A Higher Hope – August 2023
Grace – a precious choice

“I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships, so will our healing, and I know that grace rarely makes sense for those looking from the outside.”
Wm. Paul Young, The Shack

Missy – such a precious little girl. In the movie/book, ‘The Shack’, Mackenzie is the father of three children, and during a camping trip, the youngest, Missy, is tragically abducted and murdered. Her blood-stained dress is found in a shack in the mountains. Mackenzie spirals downwards into paralyzing grief and agonizing despair, isolating himself from his wife and their remaining two children. A few months later, during a snowstorm, Mackenzie finds a note in his letterbox without any postage stamps and showing no footprints near his letterbox.

The note is very personal, addressed simply to him and signed by ‘Papa’, the name his wife uses for God. It invites Mackenzie back to ‘the shack’, saying it has been a long time since they saw each other. Remembering the sight of Missy’s blood-stained dress at that shack, Mackenzie is immediately transported back to that traumatic night, reliving the horror.

After much confusion, he realises that there must be more to this note than he thought and drives to the snow-covered shack, bracing himself as he again sees the blood stains. After an angry and tortured outburst, he finds himself walking away from the snow covered shack towards a greener, nicer, pleasant, beautifully landscaped cottage. There he is greeted by Papa, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, represented by three people.  Over the next few days, Mackenzie is given opportunities to express his anger, frustration and pain, saying to Papa “If you really loved Missy, she wouldn’t be dead, you would have been there for her and saved her”.

As Mackenzie grapples with these hard questions, Papa asks him,

“Will you at least consider this:
when all you can see is your pain, perhaps then you lose sight of me?”

And I wonder, do we do that as well? Lose sight of Jesus because our pain becomes our lens?

Mackenzie couldn’t accept that God is good in the face of losing his precious Missy. Through many heartbreaking moments and difficult but defining conversations with ‘Jesus’, the ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘God’, Mackenzie begins to see how much God loves him and his daughter and starts to experience healing in his life.

Mackenzie begins to experience healing in his relationships through his relationship with God and His grace.  We too find that grace really only makes sense when it is found in relationship with Jesus, when we choose to trust Him. In those few days with the ‘Trinity’, Mackenzie was continually given choices, to accept and grow through the knowledge of God’s grace or to walk away from it.  Grace IS a choice.

As Gary Chapman suggests,

“no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the evidence in front of you, God is asking if you will believe Him rather than what you can figure out about your life. He does not promise to make all of life better or give you an understanding about why He has done what He has done. But He does offer His grace in the midst of the storm.”
(Chapman, 2013, p. 97)

It’s all about relationship. Mackenzie came into a relationship with Jesus, trusting Him, accepting His grace and found healing begin. Isn’t it the same for us and our students, and school families? As we walk in relationship with Jesus, learning to trust Him, we realise how much Jesus loves us and offers us. In relationship, we trust that what He wants for us is for our best. In relationship, we choose to accept His grace and find our perspective changing, freeing us to find joy in Him. In relationship, our lives model that choice. Our constant hope is that our students and their families, who are bombarded by the world’s voices, will find our schools to be places for them to hear, see, decide and enter into a relationship with Jesus as well.

As we grow in relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ, may the way we teach and interact with our students and their families encourage them to be in relationship with Jesus and to realise His promise: “I came to give life and life in all its fullness.” (John 10:10)

Joy IN Him? Absolutely.

Choose grace? Yes, please.