By Jim Nichols

It spreads like a bad infection. “This will be the best Christmas ever! If you thought that gift was a surprise, wait until you open the rest of these!” Or “Whatever decorating we did last year, this year will be even greater and brighter.”

It is difficult to avoid getting caught in some type of race during this season. Sure, we get tired, stressed, and overly busy, but somehow, we think it is all worth it. The underlying competition (against whom?) takes us over. 

I had my Big Chief Red Tablet open, and my pencil poised. My classmates were ready too. The teacher stood at the front of our fourth-grade class and began reading off numbers in quick succession. “29, 45, 4, 24, 83, 37, 91, 23, 76, 44.” We copied them down as fast as we could. There were too many to add up as she called them out rapidly, but the race was on to add them once she stopped speaking. My hand shot into the air, ahead of anyone else. The teacher called on me. “456,” I said. “Correct,” she replied. She began reading another series of numbers that we dutifully copied down and added. It was partly a game, but clearly an educational one. It fed our fourth-grade competitive nature. It is unseemly to brag, but I was good at this. Very good. The teacher was always impressed, as were my classmates. I was proud.

It did not occur to me at the time that a shadow of competition was beginning to cover me. Some of my friends were slower at addition than I was; I suspect they were envious of me and embarrassed at their lack of numerical quickness. In retrospect, I also suspect that God was not impressed either with my attitude or my addition skills. I say that because as an adult it does not seem to me that God follows the laws of arithmetic well. Things just do not add up to God in the same way they do to me—numerically or in any other way. I am certain that God knows the rules; He just does not seem to follow them all the time. Or perhaps He has something else in mind. Occasionally, humans act like God in their view of rules. Perhaps it is part of our spiritual growth.

Three years later I was engaged in a snowball fight with a neighbor girl who I kind of liked whatever that means. In her front yard I threw a snowball at her and, when she ducked, the snowball smashed through the glass front door of her house. I do not remember the details, but I knew that, when her dad came home from work, I would have to walk back down to her house and apologize. I was prepared for the worst, assuming that the least would be that I would have to pay my allowance money to fix the glass. I knew her father and was already petrified by him; he seemed gruff, harsh, and unfriendly.

That evening when I reappeared at her house he was not as hostile as I expected. He was, frankly, forgiving. He had already repaired the crash and offered me only an admonition to be more careful. He did not add things up the way I thought he would; grace showed up.

It occurs to me that God’s weakness in human arithmetic is a display of His grace. Despite my young skill at adding up numbers, at my death I will not have a perfect score. That is a key point—there is no way I can merit God’s approval. His justice and mercy are much different than human versions of justice and mercy. We just continue to fumble along, throwing spiritual snowballs or even something harder and often missing the mark badly. God sees all this and continues to give us the grace to grow slowly.

This is the same God who, in the form of His Son, approved the landowner paying his workers the same no matter what time of day they began. Similarly, he lauded the widow for contributing a miniature amount to the collection because she gave from her poverty rather than abundance.

It does not really add up.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain