In a Christianity Today essay adapted from his newsletter, Russell Moore says a conversation with an elderly widow may have changed how he thinks about grace.
A younger Christian had asked why faith hadn’t made it easier to “just move on” from something traumatic. Moore gave the usual formation answers, then later wished he could redo the talk. The better picture came from a woman he calls Ruth, almost 80, who had lost her husband a couple of years earlier. People expected her to move out of a house that was now too big, and to get away from the reminders. She didn’t want to leave, and not for the reason he first assumed. “I need those stairs,” she told him. “I need to remember how they changed my life.”
Years earlier, as a hidden alcoholic, she had fallen down those stairs, hit her head and nearly died. She woke up on a ventilator and finally saw that she needed help. She’s been sober for many years, and she was grateful she got to be fully present with her husband in the years that remained. The stairs still warn her that she isn’t invincible. They also remind her that, with the grace of God and the love of her friends, she stood back up, and now mentors young women in recovery. Without the fall, and without getting back up, she said, she couldn’t do that work.
Moore is careful with Romans 8:28. We shouldn’t quote “all things work together for good” as if the awful thing itself were good, or as a way of telling a hurting person to move on. The genealogy of Jesus is full of real horrors, and the Gospels don’t relabel them as blessings. The cross doesn’t make the crucifixion morally better. Grace at work doesn’t make the wound less real. It means the wound wasn’t the end of the story.
My take
I needed this. The Holy Spirit can use even a scar as a reminder, not a trophy and not a demand to “get over it.” If something in your life still looks like a staircase you’d rather forget, ask Him what He’s still doing with it. Grace can carry you, and then, when you’re ready, you can carry some of it to somebody else.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
