"Isn't that unfair?"

The title of this post is a question a friend asked me a few months ago after we'd been talking about grace (the same grace I spoke of in my last post). Last week that question came back to my mind, and I spun it around some, to see if I could make grace “fair”.

The first alternative I thought of was the possibility that grace was meant to turn failure into a learning opportunity. One suspects that the captain of the Titanic, had he survived, would have become the world's greatest advocate for lifeboat reform. If someone gets burned in failure, you would think they would develop a very emphatic resistance to that same failure. I don't really believe that though – just as dogs eat their own vomit, humans tend to repeat the actions that hurt them, even with full recognition that it turned out badly for them before.

The next alternative I thought of was that grace was a form of punishment, or perhaps restitution. Again with the Titanic captain (there were others culpable, but I'll stick with this illustration), would he suffer more for his failure in death, or in decades more of life, with hundreds of deaths on his conscience? Another way, is the best manner in which he can repay his victims by becoming one himself, or by ferrying more passengers safely across the Atlantic? The trouble with this though, is that it isn't a just solution either. Somehow I doubt those who lost their entire families in the Titanic tragedy would say that these solutions comprise sufficient punishment and/or restitution. It goes similarly with any other grace.

At the end of tossing this idea around I'm left with one conclusion. Grace, specificically God's grace, is unfair. It doesn't fit into my conception of personal justice, duty, or fairness. However, the act is already done, a gift given out of God's love, and it can't be returned. My choice then, is to complain about the unfairness of grace, reject it on that basis, and let that very expensive gift go to waste, or, to accept it and run with it. I'd rather choose the latter.