Grace did not come to me initially in the forms or the words of faith. I grew up in a church that often used the Word but meant something else. Grace, like many religious words, had been leached of meaning so that I could no longer trust it.

       I first experienced grace through music. At the Bible college I was attending I was viewed as a deviant. People would publicly pray for me and ask me if I needed exorcism. I felt harassed, disordered, confused. Doors to the dormitory were locked at night, but fortunately I lived on the first floor. I would climb out the window of my room and sneak into the chapel, which contained a nine-foot Steinway grand piano. In a chapel dark but for a small light by which to read music, I would sit for an hour or so every night and play Beethoven's sonatas, Chopin's preludes, and Schubert's impromptus. My own fingers pressed a kind of tactile order onto the world. My mind was confused, my body was confused, the world was confused - but here I sensed a hidden world of beauty, grace, and wonder light as a cloud and startling as a butterfly's wing.

       Something similar happened in the world of nature. To get away from the crush of ideas and people, I would take long walks in the pine forests splashed with dogwood. I followed the zigzag paths of dragonflies along the river, watched flocks of birds wheeling overhead, and picked apart logs to find the irridescent beetles inside. I liked the sure, inevitable way of nature giving form and place to all living things. I saw evidence that the world contains grandeur, great goodness, and, yes, traces of joy.

       About the same time, I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth-century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

                                                                                                                       - Phillip Yancey -