"If grace is the central truth about God, this is a Mystery I want to stay near. Living along its edge may still be confusing, and I may often stumble around in the fog of doubt, but again this must be said: it doesn't matter. For if the Mystery is benign and life-giving and eternally loving, then I do not need to comprehend its hidden currents. The wind blowing off it can keep me aloft. What have I to lose? If I fall, I fall into the Deep, I fall into a place no more dangerous than the Everlasting Arms. It will be no less dangerous, of course; the Deep is never safe. But its danger exists within a grand adventure, its pain is part of a profounder joy, its judgment serves a final salvation.
"When the choice is put this starkly, I can do nothing other than to keep believing in a God who relates to the world — including me — with grace, a God who in the man Jesus, entered fully into our humanity, its joys and sorrows, to redeem it from within and lead it toward a goal that will be the fulfillment of our deepest longings, a goal the Bible describes in images such as "kingdom" or "resurrection' or "heaven." This God, moreover, continues to blow the divine Spirit across the unformed, threatening darkness of our lives to bring creation out of chaos, life out of death. On this breath I can rest; with the lift of this wind I can soar.
"Perhaps I have simply fallen back on a familiar paradigm, the structure of reality in which I have lived my whole life. But what advantage is there in the alternative? It must surely lead to absolute despair. More important, there is this: what I saw at the bottom of the pit. It was not nothing but something; it was Someone with a will to save, Someone who was holding me.”
