Every Ounce

I read a bit of something St. Basil the Great wrote back in the 4^th Century. He was responding to the question, “How shall we repay the Lord for all his goodness to us?” As St. Basil writes, he talks a bit about the immensity of God’s goodness to us. Then, in reflecting upon his own experience, Basil writes:

He is so good that he asks no recompense except our love: that is the only payment he requires. To confess my personal feelings, when I reflect on all these blessings I am overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God and of bringing shame upon Christ because of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities.

This is one of the things I ponder periodically, also, and, if I’m not careful, can fall into despair. It is the very real possibility that I may be so taken with the things of this world with which I become fascinated that my love for my Lord may grow cold. It is quite possible that my heart may even grow resentful against God for keeping me from those things that I think I may end up craving. That thought often brings me to repentance and contrition. And that act nearly always ends in humble thanks and praise to God for his mercy and grace.

The psalmist wrote, “My sin is ever before me.” (Psalm 51:3) It is quite obvious to me, when I am given to reflection on it, that I am a man who is in constant and desperate need of the grace of God at every moment in and in every fashion for my life. That God lavishes grace on me (Ephesians 1:7-8) is not because he’s got so much that he doesn’t know what to do with it all. God dumps those bucketfuls of grace out on me, one us, because we need every ounce. And there isn’t one ounce of grace that God holds back from us.