amazing grace

I'm in the middle of rereading "What's So Amazing about Grace", and it's helping me filter and recognize more of the acts of grace around me. In spite of the day that wouldn't die yesterday, in which I was told I needed surgery and I might have dug myself deeper in the hole of losing all my iTunes (but thanks everyone who's trying to help me recover them!)

In an attempt to counter the snowball effect of fixating on all the things that went wrong (something I do too often), I'm going to think about what I'm thankful for (something I don't do enough).

1) My Jewish family and the ridiculous hospitality that they show, especially around tournament time, to make sure I'm fed with good food. I read the other day that grace was extravagent. I saw that clearly last night with a homey dinner with the kids and the offer from M (the babysitter/housekeeper) to pack me a dinner every night this week that I couldn't come to dinner so I could eat a home-cooked meal after practice. How nice is that? And she's catering the menu to my carbo-loading needs. Wow.

2) The bus driver who waited for me yesterday. For all the times buses have passed me by - after work, it was raining and I was crossing Astoria Blvd when I saw the m60 bus coming from afar. I closed my umbrella, bolted across the street (even though the light wasn't quite changed yet), and started sprinting 3 blocks to the bus stop. I looked up through the rain and saw that there wasn't anyone at the bus stop, and knew that the bus was about to pass me by.

The bus passed me while I still had a block left to go.

And then it put its blinker on. It was going to stop! So I kept sprinting, got to the bus, and tried to thank the driver for stopping (but since I couldn't breathe, it came out more like "th-nn-nkk-ks"). He said "well, I figure if you're running, I'd stop for you".

That saved me 20-30 more minutes of waiting in the rain. Yay for nice bus driver! (The other people on the bus looked at me like I was crazy because it took me awhile to stop heaving).

3) The fact that Sr comes with me to all these tournaments, paying his own way. It's really not the protocol for coaches to pay out of pocket to go and coach. In fact, it makes me feel guilty because when I go to away tournaments to coach kids, their parents pay my way. That's just how it's done. However, given the large difference (let's face it - vast chasm) between Sr's paycheck and mine, and I guess to some extent our relationship, he's never asked me to cover his expenses. Which is a relief because I just wouldn't be able to.

Yancey defines grace as something that "costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient". Something to ponder...