Grace Catalogue

NCF Office – October 7, 2025 4 Comments

We are being blessed with several grace-filled stories from Judson’s life in this week’s blogpost. May reading his stories prompt you into your own recollections of past or present graces. –Melissa Logsdon, NCF Associate Pastor

From My Record of Grace 

Sometime in my life, I can’t exactly remember when, I started keeping track of important moments where I believed I had encountered God in power and/or weakness. Moments when God and God’s people gifted me in grace with small and large moments of personal signs, wonders, dreams, help, insights, or deep emotional experiences that helped me to do what was needed in my life.

I’ll share a few of them on a common theme with you.

Saved by Sinn and My Older Sister 1955

An early example was at Sunday School in 1955. During opening exercises, I think one of the older boys made a very accurate reproduction of the sound of flatulence. I got tickled and started laughing. The laughing didn’t last too long because one of the supervisors, an older veteran of country school classroom management grabbed me by the arm and dressed me down in front of the group. The sudden turn of events terrorized me with the consequence that I could no longer tolerate being in that opening space. 

The gift of grace came when it was decided that I could be with my older sister, Mary Evelyn in her 3rd grade class and its sweet and nurturing teacher Mrs. Sinn. It was special because I didn’t know for sure if my older sister even liked me, but she and a kind woman named, of all things, Mrs. Sinn, saved me in my 5 year old time of need. I didn’t know the word “irony” at 5, but the word play on being saved by “Sinn” was not lost on me and hinted at a God with a life-lesson with some sense of humor. 

Pizza Hut Epiphany 1967

My early church experience was a combination of some good-hearted and caring congregants mixed in with others, usually in leadership, of a legalistic, mean, and condemning bent. I was a tender-hearted  boy,  open to God, but genetically prone to anxiety and melancholy on my mother’s side and so the legalistic and condemning preaching I was exposed to took a toll on my 17 year old soul and left me perceiving God as vengeful and eager to condemn souls for their sins. My youthfully passionate body and insecure male ego was certainly a candidate for an eternal hell. 

But summer of 1967, I’m sitting in a Pizza Hut in Bloomington with my girlfriend looking out the window at a beautiful prairie sunset when words came to me with the power of anger and release: 

“Any God who made these beautiful skies and sunsets and shares them freely with us cannot be the angry, mean xxxxxxx they’re describing at church!”

So the vengeful god in my life was first diminished. The short epiphany lasted only a moment, but part of it stuck. It was like heaven bent over and began healing me of something I could not begin to heal myself. God had made a good start in my life but there were additional moments and movements. I’ll share a couple more.

Marty Shupack and Stan Clapp “Wait until you have children, then you’ll understand.” (1978-79?) 

For those who don’t know Marty, I’d encourage you to attend the NCF Jubilee Reunion and meet him along with his wife Diana. Wonderful Christians with openness to the presence of Jesus and the Holy Spirit as well as the justice of God’s coming kingdom. Both of them gifted and humble.

Sharon and I knew Marty well beginning in 1976 when we moved back to C-U to be part of the church. Marty was our friend for life and a housemate for a couple of years. Marty was also an elder to us and many others in NCF. He was also a personal shepherd to me, so much a shepherd that I shared with him my residual spiritual anxiety that centered on perfectionistic expectations and self-performance standards that hindered my own path to being a good, adequate elder in NCF.

Marty cared about me and helped me move forward. One step he engaged was to arrange a meeting with Stan Clapp. Stan was a local minister who led a small congregation in town and had a ministry of spiritual advocacy and healing words of wisdom and knowledge. Marty arranged a meeting of the three of us. In the meeting Stan was a compassionate and empathetic listener. I was anxious to hear what he would say after our conversation. I was hoping for some kind of powerful word of deliverance or call to me for ministry. But all Stan said was, “Wait until you have children of your own. Then you’ll understand.”

I was crestfallen. I had expected more and some immediacy to address my issues. By Sharon and my reckoning, a child was 2-3 years down the road! So all I could do was wait.

“Daughter of grace, love has touched me through you.” 1984

So I waited. Another 6-7 years I waited. One night, I was waiting for my two year old daughter Elizabeth to fall asleep. I myself was not having any problem falling asleep and Elizabeth had to remind me, “ Daddy, keep reading!”, “Daddy pat me! Pat me Daddy!” My baby girl was just a delight to me in so many ways…playful, precocious, smart, and strong-willed…a delightful bundle of energy and fun. Sitting at her side that night, words to a new song/poem came to me about the commitment of love in a parent for a child, a song that proved prophetic in many ways: (And feel free to change language as matching your own experience of committed and covenant love)

As I spend these moments, Resting at your side 

Waiting dreams and peaceful sleep, Wondrous thoughts arise.

I am caught in the wonder, Of my love for you.

Taken unaware by power, of grace so pure and true.

Is this moment only passing…Now but never again?

Or is it light of eternal love, Breaking the shadows of sin?

As I spend these moments, Resting at your side.

Thoughts of friends, growth and change,  Wrestle in my mind.

Now I hold you in my arms, but in ever loosening embrace,

Changes, friends, dreams you choose, Quickly take my place.

Will these changes be only passing? Shadows before a new day?

Or will change become a night, that forever keeps you away?

As I spend these moments, resting at your side

There’s a gift I give to you, Of grace so pure and true!

A Father’s love unending, That knows no grief or shame

That could close these open arms…To one who bears my name.

What I give has been given from a Father to me…

Love and grace that can endure through all eternity. 

refrain:  Child of my love, what joy is in my heart!

  Daughter of grace, love has touched me through you!

With hope from above, and eternity’s embrace

  Of a Father, Our Father, the Father of love.

I’ll close with the song lyrics and three encouragements. The first encouragement is to start or review a grace record in your own life. Delightful memories are harder to come by these trying days. Perhaps it’s something we could celebrate while we’re seated with God as Shereen shared on Sunday. 

The second encouragement is to share our stories with others as I am doing here. Thank you for reading this as my discipline of writing it raised multiple positive grace memories I had forgotten.

The last encouragement is to take this song or another of your own choosing and hear it as God singing to you: child of “My” love, daughter or son of “My” grace, God caught in the wonder of eternal love and embrace of you and me. AMEN–Judson Chubbuck