Issue 33: Prodigal Grace
Winter 2025
Grace is everywhere. It’s what a dancer has, what’s said before a meal, what we feel when we’re forgiven. Sometimes an ideology or an individual can attempt to claim all of grace for themselves, denying that it can exist elsewhere or be extended to people they don’t find deserving. But the Christian view is that grace is no one’s but God, and that through his son, Jesus Christ, it extends to all of his creation. The dancer, the meal, the forgiver, and the forgiven are full of grace because Christ was graceful first. Even the parts of creation that seem furthest from him do not lack his imprint. In this issue of Fare Forward, we are going looking for the grace that’s run furthest from its maker.
Scripture shows that grace tends to travel far. In his creation of the world, God extended his grace to a material world wholly other than himself. Grace reaches even to the depths of loss, where it found Job childless, broke, and diseased. God’s response to Job demonstrates the awful grace of his creation – the mountains and the sea and the terrible beasts – and the greater grace of God’s sheer domination over all of it. Jesus, being of one substance with God his Father, is the ultimate extension of God’s self-giving grace to his people. In Christ’s life on earth, his grace extended in a special way towards those who seemed furthest from it – prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners.
Grace, then, is lavish by nature. In his fullness, God gives his grace to all of his creation. We invite you to look with us for this prodigal grace, in the places it is hardest to see.
Your pitch for this issue might answer questions like these:
- How has God made something bad (illness, disaster, loss, betrayal, natural disaster) into good? Have you ever experienced or witnessed “fortunate failure”?
- Has it ever benefited you (or someone you know or have read about) to learn something “the hard way”?
- How does grace come to us through art, even (or especially) secular art?
- Have you ever found access to a truth only when you finally saw it “slant,” as Emily Dickinson writes?
Please consider these examples a starting point, not a limit.
(Editorial Note: While Fare Forward is a Christian journal, we strive to practice “editorial hospitality,” by which we mean that anyone, of any or no faith background, can pick up a copy of our journal and feel that it is written for them. So don’t choose a topic that’s “intramural”—i.e., only of interest to other Christians. And as you write, don’t assume your reader is familiar with either Christianity as a whole or with any faith tradition in specific. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about the specifics, just that you’ll need to briefly explain them so the intelligent reader can catch on.)
