Early summer for my family is a parade of parties. Four out of the five of us celebrate birthdays within the same 30-day period. Our daughter Julia kicks things off on June 13 followed by my birthday on June 24, our oldest son Timothy on June 25, and then our youngest son David’s birthday on July 7.
This year, on the night of David’s fifth birthday, when I went to pray with our 10-year-old daughter, she said something in her prayer that struck me funny: Thank you, Lord, for letting David live another year . . .
It was the odd choice of words that took me aback. A stranger listening in might have thought that prayer originated from some trial or tragedy. Perhaps her younger brother had faced a serious illness this year, or maybe that day or week he had narrowly averted a terrible accident that could have killed him. It’s the kind of thanks you’d expect someone to give God when life appeared for a moment in jeopardy and death was close by as a real possibility.
But there was nothing of the sort this year. That’s why her gratitude to God for “letting him live another year” sounded so strange. My assumption as an adult was that our kids hadn’t had any close encounters with death. None of them faced any life-threatening illnesses. The “grown-up” assumption is that, apart from a tragic accident, or a malicious act of evil, or an unforeseen disease, 5-year-old boys don’t die.
I replayed that prayer in my head for a few days. “Thank you, Lord, for letting David live another year.” And the more I echoed that prayer in my heart, the more I realized my daughter’s expression better captured the reality of grace toward our family than what I had prayed that same day.
On the morning of David’s birthday, I thanked God for blessing us with the birth of a healthy little boy five years before. I thanked God for the joy our son had brought to our lives. I asked God to grow him up to be a man after his own heart. But I hadn’t thought to say something like Thank you for letting him live another year.
The assumption undergirding my daughter’s prayer was that David’s life wasn’t necessary. Things didn’t have to be the way they had turned out. David didn’t deserve another year of life, and neither did we deserve another year of that little boy lighting up our home. The fact he lived to see his fifth birthday was just as much a gift of God’s grace as the day we brought him home from the hospital.
Who knows how many accidents were averted in David’s fifth year? Who knows how close death was to our door? Who could count how many times God rearranged the flow of cells in the body to ensure that our son wasn’t struck by an illness that could take his life? Who knows how many accidents could have upended our family’s life and health? Every day, we zoom past hundreds or thousands of cars. Every day, our bodies could degenerate and die. Every day, we take our safety for granted. And every day, we are sustained by the hand of a good and sovereign God. Grace, when we deserve judgment.
Grace sustains the Christian life. Grace keeps our hearts beating and our lungs expanding. When Paul, in 1 Corinthians 4:7 asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” he intends our answer to be “nothing.” Everything is a gift. All of life is from grace.
This means something true not just for our 5-year-old son, but for all of us. God created us out of his sheer pleasure, not because he needed us. It didn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t necessary that you or I exist. It wasn’t required that God create us. The whole world is here because God wanted it to be so, and the whole world is sustained because he wants it to continue. Our existence, our every breath, is dependent upon God. To paraphrase Augustine: To be is to be graced.
In my mind, I know these truths. I know my breaths are undeserved. I know that every moment I get with my kids is a gift and that their lives, like mine, are sustained by the sovereign ruler of the universe. Oh, but too often there is a gap between our theological knowledge and the assumptions we live with! Our theoretical knowledge doesn’t seep down deep into our hearts and then find expression in our prayers and in our words and in our gratitude for existence.
This is where we need people with better-formed assumptions, people like my daughter to wake us up, to snap us out of the doldrums of our autonomous thinking, to help us escape the prison of the immanent frame, the life we live without reference to the One who created and redeemed us.
Why not say something so beautiful every night? Thank you, Lord, for letting me live to see another day! Should that not be the prayer we offer up every day, not just once a year, and not just after a battle with illness or a tragedy in which the outcome of our lives was unsure? Aren’t we all mortal? Aren’t we all dying, either slowly or quickly? Seen in this light, every day, every week, every month is a gift. Every year is to be cherished. It is only the foolishness of self-made human boasting to think that we are in control, that we are in charge, to assume that God will let us live because, well, that’s just how God is and that’s just who we are.
Grace doesn’t assume. Grace adores. Grace doesn’t expect. Grace exults. Grace gravitates toward gratitude for the unanticipated, undeserved kindnesses of God.
