I've been to the bottom. Not the figure of speech. The actual floor, where you run out of people to blame and excuses to hide behind, and there's nothing left but you and whatever you've made of your life.
I expected judgment down there. What I found was grace.
I'm not going to preach at you. I'll just tell you what happened. At the lowest point I could reach, when I had nothing to offer and no way to earn my way back, something met me that I hadn't earned. Call it God. I do. Call it whatever lets you keep reading. The point is that the bottom was not the end of me. It was where I got picked back up by something bigger than my own strength, which was good, because my own strength was gone.
Grace is a strange thing. It doesn't wait for you to clean up first. It shows up while you're still a mess, still ashamed, still convinced you're beyond fixing. That's the whole scandal of it. You don't climb up to it. It comes down to you.
The long walk back started there. It wasn't quick and it wasn't clean. I had to become the man I was supposed to be one honest day at a time, and I failed plenty of those days. But I never had to earn my way back into being loved. I already was. That took the pressure off just enough to let me stand up.
If you're at the bottom right now, hear this from a guy who has been on that floor. You are not too far gone. There is grace at rock bottom. It found me there. It can find you.
Failure isn't the opposite of faith. Sometimes it's the doorway to it.
Rush