A Grace Revealed: How God Redeems the Story of Your Life

By Jerry Sittser

Twenty years ago, Jerry Sittser lost his daughter, wife, and mother in a car accident. He chronicled that tragic experience in A Grace Disguised, a book that has become a classic on the topic of grief and loss.

Now he asks: How do we live meaningfully, even fruitfully, in this world and at the same time long for heaven? How do we respond to the paradox of being a new creature in Christ even though we don’t always feel or act like one? How can we trust God is involved in our story when our circumstances seem to say he isn’t?

While A Grace Disguised explored how the soul grows through loss, A Grace Revealed brings the story of Sittser’s family full circle, revealing God’s redeeming work in the midst of circumstances that could easily have destroyed them. As Sittser reminds us, our lives tell a good story after all. A Grace Revealed will helps us understand and trust that God is writing a beautiful story in our own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9780310411918

Book preview

Preface

On the eve of the weddings of my three children I gave each of them a photo album as a wedding gift. At first glance it would seem that the albums consisted of little more than a random collection of photos, each photo capturing a fleeting moment in their lives. But as you can probably guess, the albums, containing perhaps a hundred photos, tell the story of how the children grew and changed between birth and marriage. A narrative thread runs through each one.

Story is the theme of this book. God has written and played the key role in the story of salvation, which promises to redeem our stories — mending what is broken, healing what is sick, making right what has gone so wrong. This glorious story of redemption turns on the work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of the world, who came into this world to make us new, which he accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection. It is all his doing, a gift of pure grace. But we must receive this gift and make it our own, like children growing into adults. Redemption means becoming the new persons we already are in Jesus Christ. In fact, we can become new in Christ because we already are new in Christ.

If you have glanced at the Table of Contents, you have already noticed that I take the theme of story quite literally. The chapter titles make that clear enough: Characters in Search of a Story, A Story in Search of Characters, Scene and Setting, Plot, and Author. I realized early on that I could not write a book about story if I were not true to its very nature, for all stories include characters, scene and setting, plot, author, and the like. This is true of the biblical story; it is equally true of yours and mine. The organization of the book, therefore, reflects this theme.

I also realized that I could hardly write a book about the redemptive story if I did not tell stories along the way. Here I faced a choice. Books of this kind tend to string together a series of disconnected anecdotes and quotes that illustrate the various theological points made along the way. The theology unites the book, not the stories. But I wondered if that was the right literary strategy to follow in a book about story, for it would seem to undermine the very point I was trying to make. I decided, therefore, to use one story as an illustration of the story, in order to show how our human stories fit into the redemptive story. Once I made this decision, I thought it best to use the one story with which I am most familiar, namely, my own.

You will notice along the way, therefore, that I reflect on my story — really, my family’s story — as it was unfolding during the writing of the book. On several occasions I refer to my daughter Catherine as being pregnant; she has since given birth. My first grandchild, Gideon, was born just a few weeks ago. Continual change is the nature of story itself, which I try to capture in the book.

Still, this book is not a memoir. It tells my family story, but only to explain and explore the theme of redemption. I invite you to read this book with your story in mind, not mine. The story of redemption is like no other, for it promises to envelop and transform all other stories, however sensational or mundane, tragic or happy. I see myself as a witness to this truth: God redeems our stories through his. If you dare to surrender yourself to God, he will take up the story of your life and integrate it into the great story of salvation, turning it into something so extraordinary that you will be tempted to think that it was all a beautiful dream.

CHAPTER 1

Weathered and Beautiful

In 2006, my kids and I took a family vacation to Banff National Park, located in the Canadian Rockies. We hiked some forty miles in five days, exploring many of the great features of this magnificent park. Along the way, we kept noticing a certain kind of pine tree, the white bark pine, dotting the landscape, especially at higher elevations. Clinging to rocky cliffs overlooking pristine lakes, massive glaciers, and deep valleys, they looked like sentinels keeping watch over the world. Each one was obviously weathered — trunks gnarled; limbs broken off; bark roughed up by wind, rain, sleet, and snow; clumps of needles stealing bits of sunlight; clawlike roots gripping rocky slopes. These trees had passed the test of time and survived, sculpted by the elements into extraordinary works of art. They were truly beautiful — not beautiful like a child’s innocent and delicate face, but beautiful like the carved and aged face of a lifelong fisherman or farmer. These trees were strong and seasoned, full of years and memory and character.

EXTRAORDINARY BEAUTY

Those trees symbolize what I believe God wants to accomplish in our lives, which is to work complete redemption. He wants to use the harsh conditions of life to shape us — and eventually the whole world — into something extraordinarily beautiful. Redemption promises to transform us, completely so. Once broken, we become whole again; once selfish and insecure, we become stately and serene and self-giving; once rabid sinners, we become glorious saints. In short, God purposes to claim us as his own — no matter how far we are from him, how fallen into sin, how lost and lonely. He wants to restore us to a right relationship with him and to remake us according to the image of Jesus Christ, which will ultimately lead to the renewal of the whole world. This is God’s doing, from beginning to end. God is the one — the only one — who can, does, and will work redemption.

Redemption has become significant to me, and for very personal reasons, as I will soon explain. It is a biblical term, too. But like other biblical terms, such as justification, reconciliation, and atonement, it seems alien and even intimidating to us, the religious equivalent of an algebraic equation. We don’t use the term much in regular speech, and we don’t usually ask people, How’s your redemption going? which would make us appear insufferably religious and weird. The word might occupy a place in our religious vocabulary, useful to toss around at church or in a Bible study, but it hardly seems relevant to daily life.

I want to reclaim the word and make it understandable, useful, and meaningful for ordinary life. It is a rich term, and it captures the entire scope and drama of the biblical story, which is redemptive at its core. I hope to define and explain the term in such a familiar and practical way that it will make a genuine difference in your life. This is the goal set before me.

But I need something from you, too, which I am going to ask for up front. I want you to read this book with your own life in mind, your ordinary life, the real life you are currently living, whether you are young or old; single, married, divorced, or widowed; employed, unemployed, or retired; rooted in a community or profoundly lonely; satisfied with your circumstances or disappointed with them; elated about life or discontented, restless, even depressed. Redemption is the work of Jesus Christ applied to the unfolding story of life, your life and my life. It turns gospel truth into a dramatic narrative and makes theology applicable to everyday life. Redemption happens through God’s involvement in the ordinary circumstances of life, no matter what those circumstances happen to be. You are not beyond God’s redemptive reach — not now, not ever. So I ask you to read this book in light of your life as it is right now.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

I should probably explain how I came to write both A Grace Disguised, which was published in 1996, and now this sequel, A Grace Revealed. Many years ago my family suffered a terrible tragedy. My mother, Grace, who was visiting us for the weekend, my wife, Lynda, and my youngest daughter, Diana Jane, were all killed in a drunken-driving accident. I survived the accident, as did my other three children, then very young. That the accident occurred over twenty years ago means that I have gained a great deal of perspective over time. I am no longer looking ahead into some terrible void, as I was right after the accident occurred, seeing nothing but darkness. I am now looking back, some twenty years later, on what has happened since. Not that life has been easy. This book will not tell a sweet and simple story about tragedy leading to triumph. Still, I hope it will tell a redemptive story.

In the months and years following the accident, I realized that the tragedy itself, however catastrophic, could actually play a less significant role than what God could do with it and how I would respond to it. Would it cause a downward spiral of destruction, or would it illumine and illustrate a story of grace and redemption? I chose to believe it would tell a redemptive story, trusting that God was still God, sovereign and wise and good, however miserable I felt and distant God seemed to be. I set my mind to ponder the redemptive course that was laid out before me, shrouded, as it was, in mystery.

What, I began to ask, does redemption really mean, given my unwanted and undesirable circumstances? Where does it lead? How does God work redemption in our lives? These questions — and many others as well — brooded inside me. How could a grace disguised in an accident become a grace revealed, discovered, and experienced in the unfolding story of my life? Shattered as I was, I purposed to learn as much as I could and catch glimpses of how God works to redeem human life, including my own.

But this is a book for you, not for me. My story will make its way into the narrative from time to time. Still, I am more interested in helping you discern how God is working redemption in your life. This is why I invite you to read this book in light of your own circumstances. An accident and its aftermath provided the setting for my story, like props on a stage. What is the setting for your story? How can you play your role in that story well, even if it is a role you would never have chosen? How can you exercise the kind of faith that will give God room and freedom to do his work?

If anything, I share my own story with a certain degree of ambivalence. My editor and I even disagreed over how much of my story to include in the manuscript, I wanting less, she urging more. As I have already mentioned, some fifteen years ago I wrote a book about loss, written in the wake of the tragedy that so dramatically changed the life of my family. The first draft of A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss was entirely theological, telling readers what to think about loss. My friends liked the draft well enough but commented that it was too abstract and impersonal. You have to tell your story, they said to me. If you don’t, readers won’t be able to identify with it, or with you. After much prayer and reflection, I chose to tell the family story, though I felt acutely self-conscious about it.

I faced two problems. First, I didn’t want our family to be defined by the tragedy, as if we were little more than the family that lost three generations of women in one accident. This concern — an entirely legitimate one, it seems to me — caused me to focus attention on our response to the tragedy rather than the tragedy itself, on God’s gracious intervention after the accident rather than his apparent absence during the accident.

It was also important to me that our story not overshadow anyone else’s, which would be easy to do considering how dramatic it was. I believed then, as I do now, that our loss was no more difficult than the losses many others have experienced, nor was our pain any more acute. I have received thousands of letters since A Grace Disguised was published, and each one reminded me that people experience catastrophic loss in a variety of ways, all of them bad. Mine was no more severe than others. For example, I never had to face rejection; I never had to care for a loved one with permanent disabilities; I never had to absorb one loss after another, the first setting off a chain reaction, with many more to follow. Taken as a whole, my story has been quite good. My children and I simply had to adjust to a severe trauma that swept over us like a tidal wave.

In a matter of a few years, our life as a family of four returned to a normal routine. How much can I really say about it? Like most people, I worked a job (a convenient, meaningful, and flexible job at that!), reared three children, and managed a home. I learned to make life work. All things considered, our lives have been quite normal. Now grown, my kids are thriving. There is only so much I can write about such an ordinary life, except to recount how normal it was. Maybe this is the point. God works redemption, whether life takes a dramatic turn or continues on its usual course. In the end, redemption is about God — who he is and how he works. He is the author, we the characters.

Still, I believe that telling stories is necessary and important, for it is impossible to understand redemption apart from story — the biblical story, of course, but also my story and your story. This is why I have chosen to include stories in this book (mostly mine, because it is the story I know best), for they help to explain what redemption means in concrete terms and how it applies to life as we live it from day to day.

THE PARADOX

Redemption is rooted in a paradox, which can be summed up in a simple phrase: we become who we already are in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is redemption; Jesus Christ is also the one who works redemption. We are already redeemed through his work on the cross and in the resurrection, and we are in the process of being redeemed by the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in our lives. Both are true — the being and the becoming, the position and the process, the already and the not yet. It is this paradox — lived out over time and in ordinary life — I want to explore.

I carry a vivid memory of the birth of each of my children. I remember the birth doctor laying our babies on the chest of Lynda, who gazed at them with such fierce and tender eyes. These were children who grew inside her, who were known and loved before they ever took a breath. There they were, lying so innocently and peacefully on her chest. Little did we know then what would happen in the years to come. Little did we realize how glorious and harsh life would be, how strange and mysterious and wonderful. We knew nothing of friendships they would have, of sports they would play, of music they would make, of vacations they would take. We knew nothing of neighborhood and family friends, of nannies and newcomers to the family. And we knew nothing of an accident that would send us reeling in an entirely new direction.

As I recall the joys and sorrows I did not know, nor could have anticipated, at the birth of my children, my mind wanders back to Banff National Park. I have two photos in an album, situated side by side. One is dated August 1991. Four little children stand at the shore of Lake Louise in Banff National Park, the calm azure water stretching out behind them, a massive glacier looming in the background. The other is dated July 2006. Only three children stand at the shore of Lake Louise; they are tall and strong and beautiful, and they are making a silly pose, smiling playfully and contagiously. The same lake stretches out behind them; the same glacier looms in the background.

Quite by accident, they are standing in the same place they were when that first photo was taken in 1991. But a sibling is absent, and so is a mother. I stare at those photos from time to time, my mind reviewing all that happened between those two occasions — so much that was hard, so much that was lovely and holy. The time between those two photos constitutes a long chapter in our story, a story of paradox. A family, already redeemed through Jesus Christ, experiences redemption as an ongoing story of suffering, grace, and growth.

WHERE WE ARE HEADED

So redemption involves the story of how God reclaims and restores us into a living relationship with himself so that we can become the people God has always intended us to be. Redemption is entirely God’s doing, which makes the Christian faith the exact opposite of a self-help religion. God works redemption through his Son, Jesus Christ; it is through Jesus Christ that all of life is made well and whole, all of life is healed and restored, all of life is put right. Jesus makes redemption a living reality, even if we don’t experience it in exactly the way we had hoped, wanted, and expected. He is the one who turns a young sapling into a weathered and beautiful tree.

In the course of this book I want to explore four essential truths about redemption.

Redemption involves a story. Time is the medium in which it unfolds, which is why the Bible has essentially a narrative structure. The biblical story provides clues for how we can understand our own redemptive story, as if following a kind of map of the spiritual terrain in which God works.

God is the author of the redemptive story, from beginning to end. As sovereign Lord of the universe he is writing the story — it is thus his story; we are only playing a role in it. Still, as characters in the story, we do have freedom to make choices and thus to shape the plot, though that freedom is only true freedom when, in the course of the story, we surrender it to God and do his will.

The setting and circumstances in which we live — however desirable or miserable — always play a limited role and, if submitted to God, can actually play a useful role. There are no better or worse redemptive circumstances that would somehow give one a spiritual advantage, making it easier for some more than others to be redeemed. If anything, what we perceive as favorable circumstances might actually put us at a spiritual disadvantage, lulling us into a dangerous complacency.

The goal of redemption is not immediate happiness as we might define it now, but holiness of life; not the good life as we imagine it on Earth, but the perfection of Heaven itself. In this case, Heaven is not some place out or up there, perhaps on the other side of Jupiter. It is rather a completion, enlargement, and perfection of what we experience in this life. Thus, everything that happens in this life spills over into that other and greater life, pointing beyond itself to

Reviews for A Grace Revealed

[jnmwheels · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well written and well thought out this book investigates the relationship of humans with God using a literary metaphor. If that last line doesn't make sense pick up the book and it will. Sittser gives the layman access to theological ideas by challenging the reader to think deeply about God's redemptive love and using an honest recount of his own personal loss among other examples. I strongly recommend this text to book clubs and anyone want to discover or explore redemption. The book leaves a pleasant aroma of God's presence in one's own life.