Today’s the day! Today God is pouring grace all over us, believe it or not. Today is the day when God’s grace anoints us as a place where heaven and earth connect, like the stone near which Jacob saw angels ascending and descending.

Yes, I know: most days don’t feel so revelatory or reassuring. But then, God is a surprise. Gracious love heals but doesn’t always soothe us. It comes wrapped in such wild disguises!

Take parenthood, for example. When I was pregnant, then as a new mother, I read books about child development and parenting. But the child I imagined wasn’t the child who developed right before me. I thought he would be quiet and thoughtful, a reader like me, enjoying school, drawing, daydreaming. I would explain everything; he would understand and comply. Instead, he was a physical, energetic boy who wore Superman underwear with an old beach towel pinned to his shoulders as he sped his big wheel off the edge of our deck, yelling, “Yahoo!” (Forget “Mr. Rogers.” His favorite TV show was “The Dukes of Hazzard.”) He followed our dog down an old logging road along the crest of a hill into the woods—miles of woods. It was January, snowing.

So grace in parenting has often come in sudden shocks. I asked, “What do I do now?” Sometimes grace has come slowly, when my answers proved faulty and my enforcement too uncertain. Inadequacy was the real means of grace; it stripped away my anxious self-reliance. Eventually, I learned how best to love him: to relish the humor and to take the long view, leaning back into the One who embraces without comparison, without measure, without end.

Today is always the day of salvation. Let go of what you thought you wanted. Lift your head to love’s anointing.