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My understanding of grace had previously been mostly academic, but it took on new meaning for me yesterday in a moment of failure and weakness where I desperately needed it.

I now find a particular aspect of grace to be like, in engineering terms, fault tolerance or perhaps better said—fault accounting.

When an engineer designs a thing, say your phone for example, they account for imperfections.

Despite being milled by machines, all the pieces are imperfect; they all deviate from the engineer’s design within a certain margin of error.

But the engineer anticipates and accounts for these imperfections in the design so that the pieces still fit and work together to achieve the desired outcome.

God is the Ultimate Engineer.
He is the Supreme Creator.

His design not only accounts for our imperfection but His assembly of these imperfect pieces and their interaction in operation subject the pieces to a Force that transform them, making them more and more perfect as they function until, both individually and collectively, His perfect product is produced: Christ.

“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;”
— Ephesians 4:11-13

“The LORD will perfect that which concerns me; Your mercy, O LORD, endures forever; Do not forsake the works of Your hands.”
— Psalm 138:8

God is both committed to perfection and to involving us, imperfect creatures, in the final product. And in God’s unsearchable wisdom, He achieves a straight path with crooked lines.

And part of His genius is grace.

Grace meets me where I am and loves me to where I am supposed to be.

Grace accounts for the fact that I’m messed up, that sin has done a number on me, that I’m haunted by hurt, that I’m deceived by lies and it doesn’t throw me away when I naturally mess up.

Grace allows me to be fully human while holding me accountable to the high calling.

Could this be what is meant when John writes of Jesus that He was full of grace and truth?

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
— John 1:14

His grace accounts for sin but never makes sin ok.

God deals with me in that grace.

I don’t have to worry about being abandoned. He has accounted for my shortcomings.

I stumble but He lifts me up and keeps me in The Way.

God is utterly committed to seeing His glory shine through me through His finished work of Christ in me.

“being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;”
— Philippians 1:6

God’s grace accounts for sin but never makes sin ok.

God’s grace allows me to be fully human while holding me accountable to the high calling.

Consider Hebrews 4:15-16,

“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
— Hebrews 4:15-16

The first aspect of grace I find is that it compassionately accounts for my shortcomings. It doesn’t give up on me when I mess up but it finds ways to keep working with me towards perfection.

This Hebrews passage reveals a second aspect of grace: the generous allocation of resources to achieve that perfection.

And, “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” — 1 John 4:11

Hopefully my own desperate need for grace has afforded me a slightly better understanding of it and perhaps now I can do a better job of extending it to others.

I do not claim to have apprehended, but I press.