Capacity for Grace

In cricket, when you are out, you are out. Bowled, run or caught. In football, you’re given a second chance; yellow card, red card. In baseball, it’s three strikes before you’re out.

I wonder if there has ever been a baseball player who switched sports to cricket. And if so, how he coped without all of those second chances.

When you’re familiar with justice, undeserved acquittal can be a life-changing experience. That’s biblical grace.

But when such grace becomes an over-familiar norm, justice can be an awfully bitter shock to the system.

Jesus told Peter that, if a man “sinned against him”, he should forgive him, not seven times but four hundred and ninety times (seventy times seven). [Bible:Matt18|B'rC:OJB|NT:NIV]

In my experience, when young children are receiving discipline for doing wrong, how many ‘second chances’ they are given can depend largely on the ‘capacity for grace’ worn by the discipliner.

And whether those ‘second chances’ are too many or too few will surely shape that child’s expectations for the future.

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