Ephesians 2:8
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.
Monday is the traditional secular Solemnity of the Rat Race where we have pounded into our skulls the fiction that work is the ultimate reality of life. The giddy and difficult-to-believe news of the gospel is that the fundamental reality about human life is not Work but Gift. The news, in sum, is that everything is Gift: our life, that breath you are inhaling, the eyes with which you are reading this, even the will with which you (like the rest of us) sin against God is one gigantic free gift that you couldn’t earn any more than you earned your genetic makeup. And beyond all this, God continues to give the ability to repent of that sin, to choose him, to obey him, and to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Mondays and every day, take a moment to stand ordinary life right side up and see it as it is: not the humdrum thing you “earn” but the miraculous gift that is leading you, by the grace of Christ, to a heaven we do not deserve, yet which God has spent his blood to give to us.
