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Day 2: Unperceived Grace

In Mark 9, Jesus asks the father, “How long has this been happening to him?” The man responds that his son has been afflicted since childhood. This wasn’t a new or sudden problem. It had been going on for years. Yet hidden within this long battle is something powerful—what we might call unperceived grace.

The text tells us that the spirit would often throw the boy into water and fire with the intent to destroy him. That word "destroy" means to eliminate completely. The spirit's goal was total devastation. But if the spirit had been trying to destroy the boy since he was a child, and yet the boy is still alive, then something else must be at work.

That something is grace.

This young man spent years living with something inside of him that wanted him gone—but it never succeeded. He was kept, even when the threat was constant. We often think of grace as comfort, as rest, or as peaceful seasons. But there is another kind of grace. It is the grace that holds you together when everything around you, and even within you, is trying to pull you apart.

What makes this even more profound is that it wasn’t another person trying to destroy the boy. It was something inside him. And because others couldn’t see it, it may have looked like the boy was the problem. Often, our deepest battles are not visible to others. And when something self-destructive is happening inside of us, it can appear to those around us that we are the issue.

But by God's grace, this young man survived both the enemy and himself.

Many of us have experienced this kind of unperceived grace—the kind that kept us from making decisions that would have destroyed us, the kind that pulled us back from mental places we were on the edge of falling into. It’s the grace that held us together when we didn’t even know we needed holding.

It’s like the Phoenix Palm tree, which thrives in harsh, dry environments. What keeps it alive is not what is around it, but what is stored within it. It survives because water is hidden in a place that cannot be seen. The heat is not avoided, but the tree is preserved because of unseen provision.

That is unperceived grace. And it is worth thanking God for every day.