Grace Upon Grace

What John 1:16 Tells Us About a Life Lived at the Shoreline

“Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ‘tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”¹

Grace is one of those words we use so often that we’ve become deaf to its significance. We ask someone to “say grace” before a meal. We say someone is a disgrace, or that they’ve fallen from grace. We theologize it, dumb it down, debate it — and somewhere in all of that, its meaning becomes blurred, even inconsequential.

I want to try to recover it.

Standing at the Shore

Last week, Robi and I flew down to Los Angeles to check in on our daughter, who moved there the day after Christmas. We settled into an Airbnb in Manhattan Beach, and each morning we walked down to watch the waves.

Robi in her happy place!

They are genuinely mesmerizing in a way that’s hard to explain. They carry enormous power. There is a soothing but ominous rhythm to them. They perpetually come whether you’re watching or not. They don’t care.

One wave breaks over you, and before you can even think about it, another is already arriving. As you stand there, you feel the pull of water receding beneath your feet — sand disappearing from under you. For a drylander like me, it is a seriously strange and foreign sensation. Then another wave. Then another.

Here’s what strikes me every time I stand at the ocean: you cannot capture a wave. You cannot store it, you cannot negotiate with it, or even make it come back once it’s gone. Your eyes are immediately refocused on the next one. All you can do is stay standing, stay open, eyes locked on what is coming. The moment you try to hold onto it, it’s already gone — and the next one is mounting up right behind it.

Hold that image.

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The Word Became Flesh

The Gospel of John opens with a line that reaches back before everything — before light, before the first breath drawn by anything that breathes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

Fourteen verses later, John tells us who this Word is: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

In Jesus, God compressed himself into humanity. The fullness of God entered the cramped quarters of his own creation. And in Jesus, grace is not merely a topic — it is incarnated. Grace is a person.

So what is grace, exactly? Traditionally, Christians have defined it as “unmerited favor” or “undeserved gift” — God’s kindness extended to people who have done nothing to earn it. Paul puts it plainly in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Dallas Willard sharpens the definition in a way I find particularly helpful:

“Grace is God acting in one’s life to accomplish what one cannot or will not do on one’s own. Grace is not opposed to effort, but to earning.” Grace doesn’t mean passive resignation to life. It means being active yet fully living as a receiver.

Frederick Buechner puts it more poetically:

“Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.”

And then he takes it further still, in words I return to again and again:

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

Grace, then, is not primarily a substance — not something that can be measured out in portions. It is relational. It is the overflow of a presence, Jesus. It moves the way all real relationships move: dynamically, sometimes surprisingly, never quite in the way you predicted.

Wave After Wave

All of this gives even more force to the verse at the heart of this reflection. John 1:16-17:

“And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (RSV)

Note the phrase: grace upon grace.

Literally, in the Greek: grace in place of grace. Grace answering grace. The preposition anti carries the sense of replacement, of succession — not accumulation, not a pile of grace growing higher and higher. Wave after wave, each new grace displacing the last, not because the last one ran out, but because there is always more coming.

Forgiveness. Unrelenting mercy. Embrace in the darkest moments. Courage arriving where fear once lived.

Grace also comes to me as…

• a child’s laughter.

• a great night’s sleep.

• the gift of a real friend.

• to be loved — and the gift of loving someone else.

• the smell of rain after a long summer day.

• often, for me, grace arrives in tears.

How would you define it?

Paul echoes John’s image in Ephesians 3:19, praying that his readers would be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Grace is not rationed out. It is not a limited reserve you might exhaust if you’re not careful. It is an inexhaustible succession, from a source that never diminishes.

The Challenge of Trying to Hold Water

There is, however, a real challenge in receiving grace this way. We are tempted — I am tempted — to treat it as a single, definitive event.

The moment you first encountered Jesus. The life crisis that finally resolved. The prodigal who came home. The answered prayer after years of waiting.

These moments are real. Life-changing. They mark us at a depth that goes beyond memory. We return to them again and again as primary evidence that God is real and that God loves us. And rightly so.

But then what?

Too often, what happens is this: we receive the wave, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to hold the water in our hands.

We build a theology around a single experience. We measure every subsequent spiritual season against it — and when the next season doesn’t feel like that one, when the warmth is less immediate, when prayer takes more effort, when God feels less vivid — we quietly wonder if something has gone wrong. If we’ve done it wrong.

I’ve done this myself. When I first encountered Jesus, the experience was so radically intense that it felt like the difference between watching life on a tiny black-and-white television and suddenly seeing it at an IMAX theater with Dolby sound. Everywhere I went, I saw God’s hand at work. Everywhere I went, I gushed praise. Everything was new.

But after a while, things didn’t feel the same. I wanted the initial feeling back so badly. I remember thinking: something got broken. Maybe this wasn’t even real. I tried harder and harder to recreate what I’d lost.

Robi put it plainly when we talked about this: “We must refute the try-harder mentality.”

It is a gift. You cannot earn it.

What John is describing is something far more expansive than a single encounter. He is describing a life — a whole life, lived at the shoreline, perpetually receiving. Not clinging to the last wave while missing the one currently breaking over you. Open hands. Eyes scanning toward the water for what comes next.

When the Wave Doesn’t Feel Like Grace

Not every wave feels like grace when it arrives.

Some waves gently caress the beach — like our last morning in Manhattan Beach, when the wind had died down and the crashing surf from the day before became something almost gentle, like the quiet surface of a lake. We watched just a small number of hardcore surfers bobbing in the distance, just hoping for one surfable wave.

But in life, some waves take your legs out. Some arrive as silence. Some arrive as loss. Some arrive as the slow grinding erosion of things you were counting on — your health, a relationship, a sense of God’s nearness.

In those moments, the ocean metaphor can feel almost cruel. You’re not standing in the surf feeling the water rush over your feet. You’re face down in the sand, wondering what just happened.

This is where I’ve found Ignatian spirituality — the spiritual framework developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola — deeply useful.

Ignatius was a 16th-century Spanish mystic who recognized that the interior life of every follower of Jesus moves between two kinds of experience. He called them consolation and desolation.²

Consolation describes times when you feel spiritually engaged, at peace, closer to God — when you sense his presence and things feel genuinely good. These moments are real. They are gifts. Don’t take them for granted.

Desolation is its counterpart — inner darkness, spiritual dryness, a growing doubt about whether any of it is real.

Here is what Ignatius refused to do — and what I want us to refuse as well. He refused to call desolation the absence of grace. He called it a different kind of grace.

Desolation, rightly navigated, builds what Ignatius called spiritual muscle: the capacity to trust God not because you feel his presence, but precisely because you don’t — and you stay anyway.

Pay attention. Don’t be afraid.

Receive It

Most of us, right now, are somewhere between deep consolation and real desolation.

If you are in consolation — receive it. Don’t try to manage it or analyze it into the ground. Open your hands and take it as the gift it is.

If you are in desolation — you’ve probably stopped telling people, because you’re tired of reassurances that don’t quite reach the place where you’re actually hurting.

But here is what John 1:16 is actually saying to you, in whatever season you find yourself in. It’s what Buechner was reaching toward — and what I believe is the deepest truth of the Christian life:

Here is your life. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. I love you.

That is not sentiment. That is the ground we stand on.

The grace you experienced yesterday is not the same grace you are receiving today. The grace that swells and breaks tomorrow is already forming offshore, already on its way.

Wave after wave after wave.

Our only task: receive it.

1. A verse from the traditional hymn, Amazing Grace

2. A BTW - During the live talk, I made one of my usual kinda feeble attempts at humor at this point in the discussion. “I have heard that Iggy (that’s what I call him) wanted to call these two elements ‘Happy and Crappy,’ but the Pope shut it down, so he softened it by calling them ‘Highlights/Lowlights,’ but still a no-go, so he went with the more formal Consolations/Desolations.”