Grace — Anne Lamott

 

This morning I walked in my neighborhood.

Down Lakeview Drive, which if you stretch your gaze past industrial development in the distance,  you can actually see Utah Lake. This is an area of Utah County that I often describe as “rural meets urban.”

Along Lakeview there are a few farms, holding up the rural part of the meeting. One of those has goats, that seem quite ready to have little goats with this arrival of Spring. I took this goat’s picture this morning, who came near me at the fence.

I hadn’t planned on walking this morning. I needed it. I just didn’t know that. Something in me wanted grounding, the physicality of the place in which I live. There is grace in the encounter. I was changed, ever so slightly to the delight of the simple and the physical — just a guy taking an early morning walk. And then there were goats.

Anne Lamott, an American writer and activist says of grace,

I do not understand at all the mystery that is Grace —
only that it meets us where we are
but does not leave us where it found us.

I used these words yesterday as an “end point” for a circle of 10 of us that were present for The Circle Way Board Call. This was not the grace of some miraculous transition. This was the simple grace, for me, of turning to one another, not just willing to be moved, but expecting to be moved.

Whether just taking a walk, or expecting to be moved because of how we attend to what we attend to — like we did in yesterday’s board call, I’m glad that grace is available.

To leave us changed, and I would say opened, from where we began.