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I hadn’t realized they would be so miraculous.

There I was, gazing upon a tiny pond in an obscure hamlet of rural Arkansas.  The silver shimmer of the water flashed forth the smile of the sun.  A chilly winter wind whispered through the stately ranks of evergreen trees and combed its fingers through the dry grass bordering the water.  And all around me, in the air, on the breeze, vibrated a chorus of echoing strains.  Had my eyes been closed, I might have believed I was amid a group of heralds preparing their trumpets, or surrounded by the brass section of an orchestra tuning up before a concert.  However, the refrain was rising not from messengers or musicians but from a flock of over one hundred of some of North America’s most majestic and impressive birds—Trumpeter Swans. 

These birds are an uncommon sight south of Canada and the upper Great Plains, where they spend their summers breeding and raising young on boreal lakes and ponds.  However, for the past three decades, a band of especially adventurous Trumpeters has been making an annual migration journey all the way from the north to the welcoming waters of Lake Magness in my home state of Arkansas. 

I was in awe of how far these birds had traveled, how many days and nights had been filled with the pulsing of their wings, how many miles they’d journeyed to enter my world and barrage me with their beauty.  I marveled at their presence, these ethereal visitors superimposed on an otherwise commonplace setting.  I wondered at the uplifted arches of their necks, at the way they canopied their wings above their backs and skimmed over the water like a fleet of paper boats.  

I spent the afternoon on the grassy fringe, drank all that delight into my soul.  And even when the sun slipped away and dusk bloomed purple, I didn’t want to leave.  I didn’t want to turn my back on all that beauty and retreat to raw reality.  Even that night, as I floated into the shadows of sleep, I closed my eyes and envisioned them all, gentle slopes of nesting birds drifting on the twilight waters of the lake.  And I wished that I too could reflect such beauty—that I too could somehow hold the swan song in my heart.

In music and mythology, swans are renowned for their beauty—their elegant necks and perfect posture and dazzling white feathers.  But they’re also nearly synonymous with a subtler quality—grace.  The birds I saw were as graceful in person as they could ever have been depicted in any painting or poem.  And as I reflected on my experience, I realized it was this that captivated me the most—the presence of grace.  

What do we actually mean when we use the word “grace” in this context?  We’re not referring to the typical definition—the unmerited favor of God.  Instead, this has less to do with salvation and more to do with serenity—not referring to the way a heart receives redemption but to the way that redemption is lived out.  For example, if we describe a ballerina as graceful, we are referring to the tapestry of her movements, to her sweeping gestures and gentle steps that create a living work of art.  If we commend someone for being a gracious host, we are once again complimenting their lived beauty—the way they can weave welcome into their words and invite guests to be free in friendship.  And when I looked at the swans, it was that grace I saw—the way their every movement seemed poetic, the fact that their beauty was born from a loving design.  

Grace in this context is, quite simply, beauty in action.  And I began to wonder:  could it be possible that this grace extends beyond certain moments—that it’s a kind of beauty born of serenity that can permeate our souls?  Is it possible to not just dance or draw or design, but actually live with this kind of grace, so that our words and movements carry healing?  I believe that it is—that we serve a God of bursting beauty, a God Who is eager to pour His glory into our hearts and empower us to live in His loveliness.  If grace is beauty in action, then the beauty of His love for us should surely be apparent in our lives. 

But the practical question remains:  how do we do it?  How do we instill that lived beauty into our world, so weary and worn and full of fear?  Perhaps it was easy for unconscious grace to flow through us first, when mankind lived in the Garden of good and strolled with the Savior in the ebb of every evening.  It might even have been simpler when faithful fishermen left their nets and learned to live to the rhythm of the Rabbi who went before them.  But here?  Now?  In the midst of the misery?  So much tries to break the beauty.  When tempers scorch the soul and words unwanted sizzle like brands on our lips, where is the beauty?  When we choose the whirlpool of worry over the river of life, where lies the loveliness?  When we are rushed and ragged, scrabbling from schedule to smartphone, who has time to invite grace in?  

My friend, I understand.  These are days when grace can seem fleeting at best.  These are times when beauty flickers brief and despair lingers long.  But I believe that right here, right now, right where we are, we can still live in grace.  Not in a cloudy “someday” in an airbrushed future.  Not on a distant horizon where the rainbow lands.  But right now—in the only time in which God ever works—today.  As those swans swirled on the lake, beauty right before me, I was sure of this:  living with grace isn’t merely a decision.  It’s a deliverance.  And I believe that the swans, so full of grace themselves, proclaim timeless truths about this simple serenity. 

The most foundational of these is also the most obvious:  swans live with grace only when they are in their element.  Even the barest glance at a swan reveals that its every detail, from its webbed feet to its weight distribution to its waterproof feathers, is orchestrated for a pinpointed purpose—living on the water.  Put a swan on land, and its innate grace disappears.  Its proportions become distortions, its feet shuffle awkwardly, and its movements are clumsy and confused.  But when swans are in the water—right where they are designed to be—their every movement radiates grace.  

So what is our element?  The answer is simple:  Jesus.  “Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,” Paul reminded the Colossian church, “having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude” (Colossians 2:6-7 NASB).  We were created to live our lives fully immersed in Christ—anchored in His waters.  Just as the swans can only express their beauty when they are in the water, so we can only live stories of grace when we are grounded in Christ.  Too often the world balks at this idea, believing that remaining in Christ must somehow confine His children to a restrictive sphere.  But nothing could be further from the truth!  Abiding in Christ means rejoicing in our natural element—the only place we were designed to be, the only way beauty can infiltrate our movements.  Why would we waddle on land when we could dance in the deep?

And for the swans, the water isn’t only the place where grace is possible; it’s the sphere where grace comes easily.  Through all the mystical minutes at Magness, I never saw a single swan trying to be beautiful.  I never saw one squinting, brow furrowed, sweat pouring, struggling to muster up grace.  No—as long as they remain in the water, the grace is a spontaneous overflow.  It comes without effort.  

How much more naturally would beauty flower in our lives if we only settled ourselves in Christ?  The words flow like a ribbon of rescue through my mind:  “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5 NASB).  He who abides in Me.  Not he who strives for me.  Not he who pants and pours and plunges for me.  He who abides—a word that means “to make one’s home”—and the grace begins to flower as naturally as a rooted plant unfolds leaves and bursts buds.  

We’re so skilled at making grace a grind.  We chase the blessings, feet pounding fast as heart, when if we only waited, they would float to us.  Our hands grip and grab, and we grasp hard for the grace, but in so doing, we only seem to crush the life from it.  And oh, how earnestly we work.  How we sweat and strain!  But grace is not something we can manufacture or conjure or contrive.  It’s not a wage earned for hours logged or a commodity whose manufacture requires weary labor.  In fact, as Jesus’ words remind us, without Him we can do nothing.  But with Him?  Then grace is a flowering inside, a rose slowly unfolding from the soil of a trusting heart, its growth inevitable as long as we are abiding.

And when we are content to remain in our element, when that grace starts unfolding in our hearts, then something amazing occurs:  we start to see the beauty everywhere.  

You see, there was nothing very impressive about the place I found the swans.  It was a tiny dot of pond in a forgotten dingle of the landscape, tucked in the foothills of the Ozarks and just down the road from crop fields short-shaved for winter.  It was nothing if not mundane.  But as long as they are in the water, swans live with grace no matter their surroundings.  A swan will glide with just as much beauty on the waters of a postcard-perfect lake in Canada, a picturesque thermal spring in Montana, or a backwoods dimple in rural Arkansas.  

Might it be the same for us?  Could we be content to float on the love of God no matter our surroundings?  Could we find Him in not only exquisite moments of bursting beauty but also howling hours of soul-shearing pain?  And could we possibly begin to find Him in that hardest place of all—those monotone minutes of mundanity, the drab days filled with mostly drivel, the normal times that stitch together the mountains and valleys of a life?  I’m convinced that if we could, if we could know that our circumstances were not nearly so important as the Presence of peace with us, then we would know grace in a whole new way. 

So this, then, is how grace grows—as we live in Christ, His work unfolds within us, until we see the beauty everywhere.  And yes, we can nod and know.  Yes, we can see the stream of grace, follow its silver shining with our eyes.  But can we live it?

Can we?  In the middle of all this?  Do we?  When our emotions come faster than our responses?  Will we?  If what we long for most never comes our way?  Could we?  After all that’s been done and said?

If that’s you today, my friend, I understand.  When I search for the grace in my life, I often come up empty-handed.  I know that God calls me beautiful and beloved, but I don’t always see that when I look in the mirror.  I want to be like the swans, want to rise on snow-white wings and glide gracefully on a backdrop of love. But too often, my wings are tattered. My movements are awkward. The rhythm of grace in my life is scratched with the screeching of disappointment or despair. So I look at the beauty I crave, and I tentatively ask what you might be asking too:  “And if I am not perfect?  If I do not always hear the song?  Is there still hope for me?” 

This question too was in mind when I watched the swans—and the answer I saw left me breathless.

You see, as I stood on the margin of that pond, I realized that many of the swans—indeed, most of them—weren’t pure white.  Instead, their feathers featured overtones of gray.  On some, it appeared in patches—a few sooty feathers on the neck, a bit of charcoal on the face, a back that was mainly ashen.  Others had an overall drab tint that prevented them from sparkling in the sun like their more dazzling counterparts. 

Were these swans of a lower rank than the others?  Were they dirty or bedraggled from their journey?  Were they permanent rejects from the snowy squadron?  No—these swans didn’t hold less promise than the others. In fact, in many ways, they represented more.  

These were the swans born this summer.  These were the ones who had shuddered from shell, who had found feathers and whispered wind and soared southward with their parents.  These were the ones learning to be swans, the ones becoming.  

And in a moment of feather-soft comfort, I knew that when I had seen myself as unlovely, when I had believed myself to be less than, when I had feared that grace could not descend on a life like mine, I had been all wrong.  

Friend, beauty isn’t a destination we reach.  It’s not a trophy we earn.  It’s not a title we claim or an award we wear or a privilege reserved for the elite.  And it’s not endowed like a spritz of pixie dust when we’ve finally managed to dot every i and cross every t and arrive on the doorstep of perfection. The beauty is here, now, in the way we are growing and becoming like Him. The beauty is here, now, as we follow our forebears, that “great cloud of witnesses” who have loved and lived before us (Hebrews 12:1).  The beauty is here, now, as we spread tentative wings and take to the skies.  

And that’s the miracle that the swans proclaim.  Grace is lived from a specific place—the love of Christ.  When we relax into His love and anchor ourselves in Him, His beauty begins to flower inside us as naturally as the seasons.  And as we live day by day in His Presence, as we are upheld by the buoyancy of His peace, that beauty is manifested in our lives.  Our every word and action become a dance to His melody.  And even on the days when we feel as if we’re flailing, when the beauty can’t be believed and grace seems to grovel before grit, we know that even then, His beauty is around us.  We are becoming—pressing closer to Him and gazing more earnestly at the truth and flying on wings that daily become more sure. 

Did you enjoy this post? What are some ways you can live with grace in your life? Let me know in the comments!

Also, click here to read more about Trumpeter Swans in general, or click here for more details about the band that visits Arkansas!