Grace! What a beautiful word! What an amazing gift to us from our heavenly Father: His all-sufficient, infinite, powerful grace! I am so thankful for His all-encompassing love that reaches down to the very point of my need—even when I least deserve it—and is manifested in my life in innumerable ways.

Where would I be without His prevenient grace that drew me to Him and prepared my heart for His entrance?

But, that was certainly not the extent of His grace in my life—only the beginning. Throughout my life's journey, His abundant preserving grace has kept me through every difficulty and every pain-filled experience. His keeping grace is a reality for which I can never adequately thank Him.

When I think of the word preserve, I think of several things: Psalm 91, Psalm 121, and Mama's fruit preserves. Even as a child, I understood, to some extent, that God could and would keep me safe and watch over me. When Daddy worked late at night, I often felt afraid and heard every tiny noise from the darkness that seemed to engulf our tiny country home. And so Psalm 91 became a favorite passage to soothe away my childhood imaginations on those long ago nights.

Verse 11 was my favorite: "For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways." (KJV) Over and over I pictured angels forming a protective circle around our little house. Looking back, I am so thankful that I learned early in life that His grace was a keeping grace.

Countless times in the years that followed, I have been comforted and sustained by that knowledge. During my Daddy's final days, some thirty years later, the words of the Psalmist again brought peace and reminded me of my heavenly Father's preserving grace. Most of my family was ill during Daddy's final week on earth, so I was the only one able to stay with him at times. Trying to stay somewhat connected with my teaching job and my husband and sons, I often felt total exhaustion, both physically and mentally.

Psalm 121 became my strength, especially these phrases: "He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep . . . The Lord is thy keeper . . . The Lord shall keep thee . . . He shall preserve thy soul . . . The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore." Once again, His amazing, preserving grace kept me through the fires of difficulty.

Meditating on God's preserving grace reminds me of Mama's scrumptious fig, peach, and pear preserves. What I would give to taste one of her fluffy homemade buttermilk biscuits stuffed full of those sweet, cooked-just-right preserves! She spent many hours in a stifling-hot kitchen carefully following her unwritten recipe. The process required a hot fire, and the work was slow and tedious.

She knew exactly when the fruit had reached the temperature necessary to safely preserve them—even without a cooking thermometer—and she never took any shortcuts. When the fruit was ready, she dipped it into sparkling clean, sterilized Mason jars, and capped each jar with a lid that had also been boiled until all germs were killed. I can still picture her making sure every lid was on as tightly as possible - Mama wanted every jar to be kept unspoiled.

Jesus desires to keep every one of us and preserve us from evil. He delights in those times that we become a "sweet morsel" in a world starving for a taste of God's grace. But, like the preserves, we must go "through the fire" in order to be made more like Him.

Only He can remove the impurities that hinder us from spreading the sweet message of grace to those around us.

And we can be sure that He never leaves us alone in the fire. He's constantly standing by, watching and waiting for the exact moment that His perfect will is done in that particular experience.

Although we long for shortcuts to growth, His timing is perfect. Mama's preserves were of no benefit to us, though, merely lined up neatly in a row on the shelf. Neither do we benefit others as His children if we're just "sitting on the shelf." We need to be about His business—spreading His goodness and His grace to the hungry souls around us.

Glenda Thaxton lives in Robeline, Louisiana, where she is a wife, mother, grandmother of four, a retired educator, a life-long Nazarene, and a junior high Sunday School teacher at Friendship Church of the Nazarene.

Please note: All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of original publication but may have since changed.