Walking in Elegance

When texting back-and-forth with my daughter recently, she sent a text that was either auto corrected, or Siri enhanced. It said, “You don’t need to wait until we leave. You can come with elegance.“ While that left us both sending each other emojis of laughter, that phrase, come with elegance, started to marinate in my head, mixing with the replay of the previous week.

For the happenings that began that Monday as only mere blips on the radar, continued to pile up through Thursday. By Friday, after experiencing the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, I found myself fighting back tears.

The day, starting out on a shaky note when I miscommunicated with a friend, went downhill from there when a fellow driver angrily beeped at me when I didn’t make a right turn as quickly as he thought I should. Continuing on its downward spiral, the day hit the wall when the attendant at the car wash shrugging her shoulders as if to say, too bad for you, turned her back on me when I reported that even though I had gone through twice, soap was still dripping off the side mirror and down the driver’s door of my car. It was then that I began to crumple under the harshness of the day.

I’m sure you can hear by now, not just one violin, but the symphony inside my head playing my own poignant rendition of O Woe Is Me.

Instead of choosing—as I knew I should—the gracious mercy of the Lord, I trudged on through the rest of that day into the next, wallowing in, and holding onto my justified hurt feelings. My heart, shrinking to the size of the Grinch’s as he grabbed the last ornament off of Cindy Lou Hu’s Christmas tree in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, marched forward in stingy withheld forgiveness.

It was when the word elegance came in that text that I began to awaken from the pinnacle of selfishness I had been perched upon. In coming to my senses, I also began to understand my walk with the Lord had not come anywhere near the loveliness of that word.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word, elegance, means: refined grace or dignified propriety. As, and because we are believers, we live and move in the grace of the Lord. Refined grace brings to mind the refiner’s fire. Not that God’s grace needs to go through it, but that we—the vessels who carry it—do.

The refining of who we are greets each one of us everyday:

• in the interaction of people in our lives who are iron sharpening iron;
• in the trials and tribulations we face;
• and even in the car wash that instead of squeaky clean, leaves a sudsy residue. 

All that we face—the good or even the seemingly bad—are then blessings from the Lord. Ones, that if we let them, can transform our hearts and draw us closer to Him. It is because of this, we can count it all joy (James 1:2).

Much love,
Kimberly 

“There’s no doubt about it; God holds our lives safely in his hands. 
He’s the one who keeps us faithfully following him. 
O Lord, we have passed through your fire; like precious metal made pure, 
you’ve proved us, perfected us, and made us holy. You’ve captured us, ensnared us in your net. 
Then, like prisoners, you placed chains around our necks. 
You’ve allowed our enemies to prevail against us. We’ve passed through fire and flood, yet in the end you always bring us out better than we were before, saturated with your goodness.”

– Psalm 66:10-12, The Passion Translation