God is always giving us little gifts - the sun coming out after rain, the happiness of welcoming a loved one home again, good food and a full stomach, the comforting warmth of blankets and pillows at the end of the day, the quiet pleasure of a day of rest, and so on. Indiscriminately, he fills our days full of these little gifts; sometimes we rejoice in them with gratitude, and sometimes we hardly notice them. Assuming we choose not to ignore them, though, these little gifts are enough to bring us joy and satisfaction for a lifetime. However, God does not limit Himself to them. His purpose, being set on eternity as well as temporality, is not content with merely blessing us in this life; He wishes also to bless us with gifts that will last for eternity and with gifts that will bring eternity to our hearts here and now. Obviously the greatest of these gifts is salvation! In between this overwhelming, unfathomable, unbelievable grace, and the little daily graces that we take for granted, though, are many rich and beautiful gifts - graces that surprise and amaze us with their extravagance, and that transform and inspire our hearts.
These intermediate graces are, I think, children of the grace of salvation. Having saved us - having bought us with the blood of Christ, adopted us into His family, and sealed us with His Spirit - God is not content to have merely covered us with His righteousness: He desires to cause that righteousness to grow up and bear fruit within our very hearts. To accomplish this purpose, He bestows upon us these sanctifying graces. There is the grace of knowing His tender comfort in the midst of great sorrow; of gaining security and peace through His strength becoming our defense in times of worry or fear; of hearing His ever-loving voice answer our confusion with His truth; and so on. They are less frequent than the little common graces, but they are also more powerful. They cause us to know God more, and thus they are indescribably wonderful.
One of the most wonderful of these graces is when God removes for a moment some veil of sin and allows us to see something with His eyes instead of our own. We may not have even realized that our vision was so obscured - but then all at once everything looks different, and we know that it looks as it truly is and the way we had formerly perceived it was skewed and blurred. To compare it to something much more trivial, it is akin to putting on a pair of glasses and suddenly seeing the world without the astigmatism and myopia. Overwhelmed by joy, the heart effortlessly overflows with praise; it is impossible to contain the gratitude at being given such a grace as this, at being privileged for one brief moment to see with clearer sight. There is humility, also, in the knowledge that the vision is not born of any merit of our own, but is purely gift and grace, and in the deepened recognition of our sinfulness and of how small our relationship with God really is - but it is the humility of self-forgetfulness, not the humility of despair. With eyes newly open in Christ to some beautiful and glorious truth, we lose ourselves in Him; our whole being is colored through and through with His radiance, and His light is the joy of our hearts.
There is a strange shyness about the things we see by these graces; the sweetness is too piercing and too intimate for it to be revealed to the world as some great spiritual experience. It is like trying to tell someone the secrets you whisper with your lover - the joy is too high, the love is too great, and above all the thing itself pulls back from being told. These graces change our hearts and draw us nearer to God; they give us new eyes to see more clearly; they are the planting of seeds and the bearing of fruit in our lives; but they themselves are not known outside the heart in which they labor. They are the love-notes of our eternal Bridegroom, delighting in His Bride.
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