Deeper With Dave: Celebrating Adele and Grace

Kids make you stupid. A friend of mine recently said this to me, and he meant it in the best way. There’s something about the wonder of a newborn baby that captures our attention and causes us to forget ourselves. And that self-forgetting can lead us to make some of the most ridiculous and regrettable sounds and facial gestures imaginable. For Carrie and me, these first three weeks with our new daughter, Adele, have been full of those wonderful, self-forgetful moments.

Experiencing the gift of Adele has led me to reflect on the gift of God’s grace in our lives. A simple definition of grace: receiving what we don’t deserve and can’t repay. That two-part definition sums up God’s grace pretty well, and it certainly sums up our experience of little Adele.

First, we are struck by the obvious reality that we don’t in any way deserve her. She’s not God’s compensation for lives well lived. No, she comes as sheer gift, as free grace from our God. (Although, Carrie might suggest the gift wasn’t entirely free!) We are very aware that not all couples receive such a gift, at least not in this form, and we don’t take that reality lightly. Second, we’re struck by the fact that we can never possibly repay God for this amazing gift. There’s absolutely nothing we could ever do that would legitimately compensate God for this beautiful baby girl. Forty years of flawless parenting (as if that were possible) could never actually repay the gift. All we can do is try to live gratefully and faithfully with this treasure.

And so it is with God's grace.  First, none of us deserves it. God never looks down on any of us and says, “That one there is good enough. They’ve earned the right to eternal life.” Rather, he looks down on us broken, helpless people, and out of sheer grace, chooses to breathe new life into us and bring us into a relationship with Him that culminates in an eternal life of worship, wonder and delight.   

And second, none of us can possibly repay God for this gift of eternal life. No act of service, no purity of heart, no amount of devotion gives God an equivalent compensation for his extravagant gift—they are simply faithful responses to the gift of his grace. We didn’t deserve it, and we can’t repay it.

So what do we do? We do what we do with any wonderful gift: we simply receive it. We celebrate it, we step into the freedom that comes from it, we surrender our lives to it, and we walk in the obedience it brings. We live with gratitude. For Carrie and me, gratitude sums up how we want to live both as parents of Adele and as children of God.

Grateful for God’s grace,
Dave and Carrie