Grace pays the bill

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Grace Pays the Bill

I was having breakfast with my dad and my younger son. As we were finishing our meal, I noticed that the waitress brought our check, then took it away, and then brought it back again. She placed it on the table, smiled, and said: "Somebody in the restaurant paid for your meal. You're all set." And then she walked away.

I had the strangest feeling sitting there. The feeling was helplessness. There was nothing I could do. It had been taken care of. To insist on paying would have been pointless. All I could do was trust that what she said was actually true and then live in that—which meant getting up and leaving the restaurant. My acceptance of what she said gave me a choice: to live like it was true or to create my own reality in which the bill was not paid.

That is our invitation—to trust that we don't owe anything. To trust that something is already true about us, something has already been done. To trust that grace pays the bill.

from Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell (Zondervan, 2005).

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