Grace.

"We need grace tonight."

It was the prayer that went up in a small rehearsal room behind the stage of the expansive space of the Ellerslie auditorium that was rapidly becoming my home, my safe place, my comfort zone.

"This music, this worship, is not something we can accomplish on our own."

Only three nights previous I stood forty feet away from where I now sat on a small rehearsal stool and played what was, for all intents and purposes, the most fulfilling and culminating event of my musical career, leading worship with an entire auditorium filled to capacity with people who had a heartfelt and intentional love of a beautiful creator God.

"But it is with grateful hearts that we sing simply because of who you are."

Back in the daily grind it seemed to me that my heart wallowed in a state of anti-climactic anticipation for the week to simply be over and my two month long stay on stage could end and give me a reprieve if only for a week.

"Only by your grace though can we stand and lead people in worship"

How often does this happen to us all: that time moves ever forward while the mind throws itself backwards, wishing to exist only in a single moment.

"And though we are imperfect, tonight we choose to set aside all other things and worship you, to prepare our own hearts so that the hearts of all others here Sunday morning may be touched with a realization of who you are and how much you love us."

My mind was ripped from its place of sitting and thrust into the realization that no matter what we have accomplished, we are all of us inadequate. It is in our inadequacy though that our God's love is made perfectly clear. A complete and whole hearted acceptance of those who have spurned, scorned, mocked, raged against, spit at and denied the very being who created them and longingly calls out to them with a love so intense that a french mystic could only describe this God as "ebros d'amour" or, drunk with love.

In the words then of Dianna Krall,

I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet.

I will always want more. There is nothing else. There is no one else...

The song of the day then: Grace - Jeff Buckley.