Moments of Grace: When God Touches Our Lives Unexpectedly

• Understand the scope of natural grace: how Moments of Grace demonstrates, through the accumulation of individual stories, the breadth of what might be called natural mystical experience — how widely distributed the experience of unexpected divine contact is across culture, background, belief, and circumstance — and what this distribution implies about the availability of grace to every human being regardless of formal religious practice
• Grasp the variety of forms: the specific forms that grace takes in the stories compiled in this book — protective guidance, meaningful synchronicity, inner voice communication, sudden resolution of impossible situations, moments of inexplicable peace or love — and what the diversity of forms suggests about the specific mechanisms through which the divine communicates through ordinary life
• Recognise the discernment dimension: how Moments of Grace addresses the question of how to distinguish genuine moments of divine contact from coincidence, wishful thinking, or the pattern-recognition bias of the human mind — and what the specific qualities of the experiences in this collection (their precision, their timing, their consequences) suggest about the criteria for discernment
• Learn the receptivity dimension: how the stories in this collection suggest that grace operates constantly but that human receptivity to it varies enormously — and what the conditions (crisis, genuine openness, sincere prayer, the quieting of the habitual mental chatter) most frequently appear in these stories as the context in which grace becomes perceptible
• Appreciate the community quality: how Moments of Grace creates a sense of community among the many readers whose stories appear — and how reading oneself into the collection through the recognition of similar experiences in one's own life produces a shift in the understanding of one's own history, revealing what might have appeared to be merely difficult or ordinary as having been, all along, touched by grace