The song lyric loops through my mind all morning:

replacing the litany of lists

and the chorus of cares

that too often occupy my thoughts.

“…we wear your grace like skin…”

Just the one line.

No more comes to me, and

I hum the six words again and again.

On our school/work commute,

I ask my daughter to play the full song,

To hear the phrase within it.

Yet this morning, it is the one line that is for me.

“We should do that,” I say out loud, “put on grace like skin,”

and she, in the way daughters do, just nods.

We should wear grace—

Not as the coats we take off and on in the winter weather,

The extra layer.

Not even as the outfits we wear that are part of the selves we present to the world,

more like the union suits the pioneers stitched themselves into for seasons at a time,

the undergarments closest to our skin.

But perhaps it is all of the above: coat, outfit, undergarments,

Grace becoming to us protection, presentation, covering.

The Scripture says to

Be “clothed with Christ,”

To “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,”

and Julian of Norwich, pondering this, wrote,

“He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us,

claspeth us,

and all encloseth us for tender love,

that He may never leave us;

being to us all thing that is good.”

I remember a friend telling me she imagined being clothed with Christ

As the floor-length fur coat she once modeled at a charity function.

“It had weight,” she said. “Like a presence I carried with me.

I couldn’t forget I had it on.”

Christ and grace—person and idea. Christ, the face of grace,

The feet, the hands, the outstretched arms of grace.

In true knowing of Christ, I know grace.

Grace presses down on me,

clings to my body, embraces me, seeps into my inner being, into my heart…

I put on grace till it becomes like skin,

That I may never take it off.