The Long, Slow Grace

I talk about mental illness, chronic pain, and the grace that keeps going

Many Graces

There are different types of grace. Did you know that? I’m not talking about what theologians call common and special. I’m talking about the concrete forms that God’s grace can take in our lives. There’s a grace of unimaginable joy, when you welcome a human being into the world. A grace of satisfaction, when rain starts falling in the heat of a summer day. A grace of relief, when medicine helps pain to subside.

The harder types of grace to appreciate are the ones that are stretched out over days, weeks, months, and even years. With my anxiety disorder, for instance, I have experienced a grace of quiet, day-to-day hope in God as a physician—working to heal and shape me not by removing the pain, but by helping me see how he is using it to better me. That’s a long, slow grace. And if we’re honest, it’s a grace we’d rather someone else have.

But long, slow grace can help erode the layers of lesser loves from the soul’s surface, bringing clarity and definition where haze used to reign. In God’s long, slow grace we can rediscover our primary purpose on this earth: being shaped to the image of God’s Son.

I sat down with David Heflin from the In the Seams podcast to talk about this long, slow grace in the midst of chronic pain and mental illness.