Grace Lavished Upon Me

By Maria-Regina, on mission in Senegal

Going into my mission, I was a little nervous because of how little I had to offer – my clumsy French, my inexperience, my total naivete and ignorance of the culture and what this mission would look like. But it is truly only within our emptiness that we can be filled. And for me, God really made sure to hammer this lesson in.

Within the first few days, I found myself not only much worse at French than my Duolingo score led me to believe, but also very sick. And while being sick and useless is never easy, sometimes it is exactly the place we need to be. When we are in bed and in pain, God tends to teach us a lot – or maybe He is always teaching us, but it’s then we are finally still enough to listen.

I got onto the plane last month, expecting to have something to offer. But the truth is, everything is grace. My health is grace. My smile is grace. My energy is grace. My faith is grace. To have anything is to have received. And until you find yourself unable to offer anything, stripped to a place of total humility and dependence, you think that your gifts are your own. But the truth is, every gift is exactly that – a gift. And it is only within this realization of my own inability and weakness that I am finally becoming capable of entering into a truth I never truly understood, which is that all my ability and strength is not mine at all; it’s something I’ve received, not earned, a gratuitous lavishing of grace that I did nothing to deserve.