Told you.

I was in Millpond Park the other day waiting for my friend Devon to get out of work. It really is a nice place. It has one of those big wooden play structures for kids, two rivers that converge, lots of field space to run around in, and plenty of children to watch. I parked my car, got out, stood by the river a while, then crossed a bridge to a little peninsula created when the rivers come together. On this little outcrop, there were lots of little paths and I followed one, trying to stay as far away from people as I could.

Eventually, I hit a chainlink fence, where I decided to pee. It feels good to pee outside.

Anyway, I kept following a path around to where the rivers meet. I threw some sticks in the river and watched the ripples carefully. It's always bothered me that people say that even the smallest rock makes a ripple that eventually becomes a wave. Little make rocks make little ripples that eventually flatten out and make an almost imperceptible impact on the shore.

As I was heading back to my car, I for some reason noticed a small tree that had been cut down. It was very small, perhaps a half inch in diameter and it stuck straight out of the ground a foot or so off the path. The top was very flat and evenly cut except for one detail: there were leaves shooting up from just beneath the cut. They were small leaves, and the chance for them surviving is very small, I'm sure, but it did make me think.

It seemed to me to be proof of a loving God. I know it's a bit naive, perhaps, but I was touched by the fact that life was growing out of something I would have thought was dead. Kinda like us.
Really, we are quite dead, us humans. No one would expect us, under the Fall, to bear any kind of fruit. Miraculously, though, we do. God, in his grace, intervenes to make us not totally deranged and evil.

When I say this, the first thing most people (and by "people," I mean Christians) think of is Christ, which is good. Jesus, ultimately, is the definition of grace; a pure and perfect human who deserved heaven but took our Hell, a deity stripped of his power and humiliated by the ones he loved. But I do not speak of this.

I speak of the fruit that even non-Christians bear. Those who do not follow Christ are still quite capable of doing great good (sometimes, even more than "Christians"). **I'd stick in an example here, but I can't think of a good one of the top of my head. Feel free to leave some good ones...**
He does not let the Fall run rampant through human lives. We could be constantly self-seeking, constantly perverse, and constantly looking for ways to hurt others, but instead, the common grace that God gives us stops us from doing these things. He saves us from what could be our fate under the Fall. What a great and graceful God that we follow, that he would extend his grace even to those who do not call him Lord.

P.S. Clarification: I do not mean to say that non-believers are not in need of the grace offered them through the cross (What I've said could be interpreted that way, I suppose.). I only want to point out that God saves them from the total evil of the Fall despite their denial of redemption. And really, it is this common grace that becomes the damnation of many non-believers. So many are stopped from coming to Jesus because they are a "good person," but they don't realize that God has intervened to keep them that way. It's almost like a deposit: God first extends his common grace to us so that we may trust him in his extension of Redemptive Grace. Unfortunately, many of us humans take that common grace as proof that we do not need redemption. In many ways, this grace is as seemingly foolish of an act as God giving us free will or allowing Satan into the garden...