Vaneetha Rendall Risner contracted polio as a child, and had 21 surgeries by the time she was 13 years old.
Years later, after having married and had children, she was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, and has suffered excruciatingly since then.
She’s also written beautifully and honestly about that suffering in a book, The Scars that Have Shaped Me: How God Meets Us in Suffering.
In one chapter, Risner writes about “sustaining grace.” You know, that common phrase we deploy in our group prayers. We pretend that’s all we really want, “sustaining grace,” because of course, we’re too spiritual to pray for outright healing.
We all ask God for sustaining grace, but as she points out — are we thankful for it, or do we just actually complain about it?
In the book, Risner tells about a conversation with a friend.
“[Her friend said] ‘Everyone loves the grace that delivers us. But the Israelites, like us, were dissatisfied with daily manna. We all complain about the grace that merely sustains us’.
We all complain about sustaining grace. The truth of it hit me hard….were my prayers for deliverance answered with the gift of sustenance? Do I not see that this was an answer, too?
It’s a tremendous and convicting point.
We don’t really think of sustaining grace as grace, at all, do we? Especially, as depressed and suffering people.
Sustaining grace doesn’t feel sweet like grace is supposed to, it doesn’t seem undeserved, as grace is. In fact, we actually feel entitled to the daily sustaining grace of manna.
If we feel entitled to it, we will never see it as grace. We will only see it as God withholding grace. Sustaining Grace suddenly becomes God’s Withdrawal of Grace.
But the truth is that sustaining grace is still grace and our failure to recognize it doesn’t change its quality.
So are you, am I really grateful for sustaining grace? Not delivering grace, but grace that feels dismal, grace that doesn’t seem graceful?
