Grace BombSýnishorn

Grace Bombs

I’ve taught from the Bible in church settings for the past fifteen years and, in so doing, have continually encountered the mega-theme of God’s grace—His unmerited, unconditional love and favor toward people. This grace is unsettling, disruptive, and can suddenly transform your life when you least expect it. 

When God’s grace falls on you out of the clear blue sky, it’s unmistakable. Few things on earth have the same kind of disruptive effect. In a negative, tragic sense, man-made bombs have a similar unsettling impact, changing lives dramatically for the worse. But when God drops a Grace Bomb, He disrupts life to restore it; His bombs are not weapons of destruction, but weapons of construction. 

The juxtaposition of the words grace and bomb struck me as a redemptive contrast: taking a concept that has brought darkness and pain to our world, like bombs, and repurposing it for good. This is also a business that God is in: taking what is meant for evil and using it for good. Most notably, the cross on which Jesus died was a despised tool of war and national conquest, and God used it to bring about the greatest good the world has ever seen. 

As a Bible teacher, I long to see people live out deep, spiritual truths in practical, everyday ways. So I thought, If God grace bombs people, maybe we who have received His grace should grace bomb people too! I reckoned that in a world of photo bombs, bath bombs, truth bombs, and some people still hanging on to the phrase “You’re the bomb,” the time might be right to rally an army of Grace Bombers who would drop tangible tastes of God’s surprising love to brighten a neighbor’s day.

Through a collaborative brainstorming effort with the creative team at my church, we designed a simple Grace Bomb card that anyone could hand out and a website to explain further what it meant to be grace bombed. These became the training wheels of obedience to our calling to love our neighbors with no strings attached. 

When we talked to our congregation about Grace Bombing, we described it as a surprising gift that is intended to brighten a neighbor’s day. We loaded them up with Grace Bomb cards to accompany any gifts, kind words, or other investments in their neighbors that God would lead them to offer. By equipping them with these cards, we were providing them with a tangible reminder that their neighbors may need an infusion of hope. We were also giving them permission to break the ice and do something unexpectedly cool for their neighbors, without seeming like a complete weirdo. 

Then these regular church people got their bomb on. They didn’t require explicit instructions; all they needed was a tool and permission. That’s how the movement was born—a movement of loving our neighbors motivated by grace, not with random acts of kindness, but with intentional acts of love prompted by the Holy Spirit.