One minute I’m meandering down
a country road on a magnificent fall day,
lost in thought, radio playing,
and the next minute I feel my wheels

on the loose gravel of the shoulder,
there’s a deafening bang and I’m
climbing out of what’s left of my car.
The cop who came to investigate

was pretty sure I’d been speeding
but settled for lecturing me about how lucky
I was to walk away from such a crash,
that I’d be dead if my car had hit the tree

just six inches further to the left.
Anyone could see that what he said was true,
but it also struck me as I stood there
watching his car flash red and blue

that it was equally true the accident
would not have happened at all
if a raging storm some sixty years ago
hadn’t blown an acorn six inches closer

to the road than where it would’ve landed
on a day as sunny and calm as the one
we were in. It was a point I thought deserved
serious exploration—though perhaps

not just then, I decided, with a hundred birds
singing their tiny hearts out overhead
and the sky raining down yellow leaves,
and definitely not with the cop.
~Jeff Coomer “Six Inches”  from A Potentially Quite Remarkable Thursday.

For grace to be grace,
it must give us things we didn’t know we needed
and take us places where
we didn’t know we didn’t want to go.
~Kathleen Norris from Cloister Walk

Grace and mercy
salvaged me when I didn’t know I needed saving,
handed me what I didn’t think I needed,
so never asked for, and
taken me where I never planned to be
because I thought I was just fine where I was.

Grace is not about giving me what I want;
not a reward for following the rules,
for being “good” or staying out of trouble.
It is rescue from a fate of meaninglessness –
a gift of God’s heart buoying me in weakness
when I deserve nothing whatsoever.

This grace is like an acorn falling
to the exact spot where I needed
a serious exploration of where I was heading,
then decades later, finding a tree standing in my path,
ready and waiting to stop my recklessness.

I am grateful,
so very grateful,
for what I did not know
I needed to know.

And now I know…