Home Pastors Articles for Pastors Max Lucado on Grace: Why Grace Is a Better Gift

Max Lucado on Grace: Why Grace Is a Better Gift

I can envision the scene at Little Carol’s house on that fateful morning in 1965.

She is eating breakfast. Her mother raises the question of the class Christmas party. “Carol, are you supposed to take any gifts to class?”

Little Carol drops her spoon into her Rice Krispies. “I forgot! I’m supposed to bring a gift for Max.”

“For whom?”

“For Max, my handsome classmate who excels in every sport and discipline and is utterly polite and humble in every way.”

“And you’re just now telling me?” Carol’s mom asks.

“I forgot. But I know what he wants. He wants a Sixfinger.”

“A prosthetic?”

“No. A Sixfinger. ‘Sixfinger, Sixfinger, man alive! How did I ever get along with five?’”

Carol’s mom scoffs at the thought. “Humph. Sixfinger my aunt Edna.” She goes to the storage closet and begins rummaging through … well, rummage. She finds paisley tube socks her son discarded and a dinosaur-shaped scented candle. She almost selects the box of Bic pens, but then she spies the stationery.

Carol falls to her knees and pleads: “Don’t do it, Mom. Don’t give him stationery with a little cowboy lassoing a horse. Forty-seven years from now he will describe this moment in the conclusion of a book. Do you really want to be memorialized as the one who gave an obligatory gift?”

“Bah! Humbug!” Carol’s mom objects. “Give him the stationery. That kid is destined for prison anyway. He will have plenty of time to write letters there.”

And so she gave me the gift. And what did I do with it?

The same thing you did with the coffee cups, the fruitcake, the orange-and-black sweater, the hand lotion from the funeral home and the calendar from the insurance company.

What did I do with the stationery? I gave it away at the class Christmas party the next year.