Getting to know Grace

Grace and Mom, 1994

In my earliest memories, I lived in a small bubble of Chinese families in a Southern town. But when I was eight, my parents went off the reservation, and we started attending a large, mostly white church. One lady that befriended us all in that lonely transition was Grace Mutzabaugh. As a child, I thought she was old as dirt with her deep criss-cross of wrinkles, but she would have been 60ish when we met. She loved games and at a time when I threw temper tantrums if I thought I were losing, she helped me stay the course through rounds of Parcheesi.

I remember in middle school, she returned from a trip to South America with a gift for me, a bird made out of animal horn. I remember liking the bird, but really marveling that she had thought of me while traveling.

When I was in high school, she tutored my mom in English. I don't remember anyone else spending time with my mom like that. They were dear friends, taking walks and praying together for many years.

Miss Mutzabaugh was the never-married founder of the National Institute of Learning Disabilities which worked closely with the church and Christian school I attended. She traveled to other countries to help missionary parents with learning disabled children have the skills to help their child and stay on the field. She was my example of a woman doing big things outside of home life. But more importantly, she embodied the Jesus-life and showed me what it was like to see people and not projects, to see people and not see labels and expectations.

But I was thick and even though I grew up in a Christian home, in a church, with Grace in my life, it wasn't until I got to college that I understood God's grace. Somewhere between the lovely community of believers I met and the books I read, it finally sank in that there was nothing I could do to make God love me more (and nothing I could do to make God love me less).

As a black-and-white perfectionist, this was revolutionary and deflating. I could not try harder, collect more achievements, do anything to increase the love of God for me. But the primary orientation of my life up to then had been precisely doing more, doing better. So once you can't do anything to earn God's love, what do you do? The doing is what is called discipleship, it's training to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (II Peter 3:18).

Some time after I left home, Grace developed Alzheimer's and had to be moved out of her house. Many of her books came to our house, and maybe a dozen or so are with me now. Looking over those titles, I got a glimpse of how this friend chose to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in a lifeling process of letting God be Lord over all that she was, heart, soul, mind, and strength.

What Grace chose to read, how far she chose to travel, or how she chose to love my family did not earn her a place a heaven. But these were part of an ongoing habit in her life to entrust herself to God. This is discipleship; this is what we do in grace; this is what it means to say yes to Jesus. We apply the strength we have to move in the direction of the will of God and trust in the power of the Holy Spirit for the rest.