Imagine you were to hear of a high mountain glen that grows all the wild strawberries you can possibly eat. It’s very remote, but you make the long hike, and sure enough, there are whole fields of the best strawberries you’ve ever tasted. You feast on them for supper, camp nearby, and after a breakfast of strawberries again the next morning, you hike back out with a big basket of strawberries in your pack.
The next year, you come again, and for some reason, there are hardly any strawberries at all; you get a snack and go home with an empty basket. But the following year you take a chance, and once again, there are all the strawberries you can eat. And so it goes, year by year — some years few or none, some years a great abundance.
Now, in the years of plenty, did you earn the abundance? In the years of lack, were you cheated? Suppose someone else lives on the mountain, miles above the trailhead where you have to start your hike. He gets more berries, more often than you, and for far less work. Does that make you angry?
God made a world of discrete graces. Some things are only given in specific times, places, ways. You might work very hard to place yourself in a position to receive whatever is given; another person might achieve a similar posture of reception with no effort at all. But your labor, whatever it is, has no bearing on the gift. What you receive is all of grace; you couldn’t — and in fact, didn’t — earn it. If there is nothing, you were not cheated; if you are filled to overflowing, you were not overpaid — because it was never payment to start with.
And so it is that spiritual disciplines are a wild, unpredictable grace. If you are willing to go places most people won’t go, to do things most people won’t do, you will be able to see things most people will never see and receive gifts that most people never receive…sometimes. God will never cheat you. If God is leading you to engage a discipline, it will be worth it. But take it from an old hand: you will frequently find your expectations confounded. You will be tempted to feel cheated. Meanwhile, others will be tempted to think of whatever gifts you did get as sheer luck.
Neither is true.
If you made a discipline of being in the right place at the right time, that’s not luck. At the same time, we are rarely promised any specific benefit in exchange for our discipline. That’s not how spiritual disciplines work. A spiritual discipline forges a posture of reception; it puts you in the right place with a basket in hand. That’s all it does. What you receive in that posture of reception is whatever God is pleased to give you. Part of the discipline is trusting that He knows better than you what you need.
Full Contact Christianity 