Ive made quite a study of conversion stories, written and oral, and I have to give Unagidon points for trying to express his religious experience.But these types of narratives always defy the ability of language to convey whats going on, so the experience sounds kind of vague and airy-fairy (Its your life that you have and a short time left to find yourself a home. Listen, push, read, ask harder, knock harder, listen again. Find something you can integrate yourself into. Find that place that your discouragement says does not exist. Trust God.) ---Jean Raber

I agree with Jean. Accounts of grace are (in my experience) always airy-fairy. There is no getting around it. But as an amateur writer who has tried to write about grace, I have tried to get around it nonetheless. I have found that there are two reasons why I cant.The first reason is that part of grace falls under a more general airy-fairy literary category called beauty. We all agree that beauty exists. But we dont all agree on what is beautiful. Something that catches me is four-dimensional state of rapture is highly likely to look like airy-fairiness to you should I try to describe it. On the other hand, a reliable description of intimacy that I have seen in the literature of every country I have experience with, is when two people appreciate the beauty of the same thing in the same way at the same time. The divide between what I know to be beautiful what and what others will call airy-fairy when I describe it is so strong and real that in some ways it divides people into classes who view the people they disagree with as savages or liberals. I can probably capture more of the beauty of a sunset by saying it was a beautiful sunset and let you fill in the blanks than to start talking about streaming glorious rays of red and purple light filtering through the pink clouds blah blah blah.So grace is hard to describe just as beauty is hard to describe, even though the question of whether beauty itself exists is not very controversial. And for those of us who believe in the existence of grace, it is precisely for the same reason. But grace itself has an additional aspect beyond beauty that also provides a second reason for making it hard to describe. Grace (to me at least) has a sense of sinfulness in it as well, as in grace is a gift from God where sinfulness is overcome by an appreciation of Gods beauty and is therefore a measure of Gods forgiveness.The problem is capturing sinfulness as opposed to just depicting sins. Sinfulness is complex in the way that beauty is complex. (Depicting sins themselves is a snap, if our entire American entertainment industry is anything to go by.) Depicting sinfulness, which I will hold is absolutely necessary if one is going to depict grace, is really hard. We can see this in standard literary conventions about evil. Evil is the Nazi concentration camp officer who also enjoys torturing kittens and puppies. True evil is the Nazi concentration camp officer who cries to the strains of a Mozart symphony while he enjoys torturing kittens and puppies. Sinfulness is a complex evil; complex because it is mixed in with good. Its complexity makes it as hard to capture as beauty. For one thing, my own sinfulness might be your liberating night on the town. My deep sinful mediocrity is your successfulness in climbing the corporate ladder through your pro-active actualization of walking the talk as you leverage corporate assets for the shareholders.When one talks about grace, one is talking about sinfulness and beauty. Its a double whammy to a writer. Plus, as a writer, even writing under a pseudonym, I am definitely happy to bore you with my accounts of the beautiful, but I am not going to bare the true form of my sinfulness. I may not be alone, which is why in my experience conversion stories take the form of the before and after (the transition from sinfulness to beauty) when in fact this isnt what happens at all. You are still a worm when you come out of the cocoon; just a different kind of worm. (Ooops, there I go again.)Grace is a species of love to the purely secular writer and is love itself to the religious writer. A good novel about love includes a good description of what amounts to the sinfulness of the lovers. This is what makes good love stories fascinating in literature and it is also why a good love story, even a simple one, usually takes hundreds of pages to tell. Bad love literature, like bad conversion literature, tends to exclude much of the sinfulness. The man is always Fabio of the Long Hair; the woman is alwaysAshley or something. I have seen pictures of romance novel covers with photo shop errors, where Fabio is portrayed with three arms rather than two. This comes closer to capturing the real nature of love than anything inside of the book.So grace is always going to look airy-fairy. Its about love. I can tell you that I love my son, and youll get it, but if I attempted to describe my love for my son in a way that would make you love him precisely the way that I do, I would probably fail the airy-fairy test.But the point is, the airy-fairyness of grace is also a quality of true love (since they are the same thing), not something that shows that grace may not exist or that it is even particularly hard to come by. Maybe you just need to find better writers than I am.