Archive for the ‘grace’ Tag
It has been a year since I last posted. My journey in the Pacific Northwest has been one of the most stressful of my life. Just to maintain a healthy connection to myself has been a struggle that I have often lost. On the one hand, I have had fairly long stretches of not feeling depressed, something I have not experienced for some years. On the other hand these times felt very tenuous. It did not give me the energy I needed to do any more than simply rest, and in the place of depression I have experienced much more anxiety than I have in the past… probably not new, just unrecognized until now as I become more attuned to its presence and role in my life.
Just realizing it is difficult enough without adding the next step of trying to resolve it in a healthy way. My anxieties circle tightly around the fear of coming short in fulfilling all the objectives in life that seem so pressing, so numerous, so overwhelming. In the past I tried to allay my fears by doubling down on my output, but more tasks always crowded into the space opened up by scratching off completed tasks. They were neverending. Doing more is a trap for me, not a resolution. I am not a machine whose worth is measured by what I accomplish. The only remedy is grace, learning to accept myself quite apart from my productivity. A deeply set pattern of 60 years is not easily broken. I share it here to encourage me further into this honest struggle.
Do-overs are packed with grace, but I often use them to beat myself with shame or obligation. “Why couldn’t I get it right the first time?” I demand, or, “I’ll work twice as hard to make up for lost time.” But grace invites me, without judgment, to try again… ironic given my Lenten goal of fasting from self-judgment. It was a great plan that was soon forgotten under the pressure of finishing my last semester and entering the job market in the middle of a pandemic-driven lock-down in which even church was closed.
So the Easter service was squeezed onto a computer screen between my Facebook browsing and covid-19 ferreting. Instead of a triumph over isolation and fear, Sunday seemed to invite me back to solitude and reflection, a second lent. And in that quiet, my soul whispered again of my need for gentleness towards myself. This was a step further than before, not just ending my self-condemnation, but offering myself kindness and consideration, kisses to my spirit.
This feels like my 2020 calling—being generous to myself and others. Inward and outward compassion is inextricable. In my experience, true self-compassion never competes with compassion for others, but rather empowers it, while harshness toward myself poisons my love for others. If I thrash myself for being late to work, I am angry with every driver who gets in my way. If I make room for my mistakes, I won’t offer sighing patience over Kimberly’s. Generosity is irresistibly expansive. Grace towards anyone, even yourself, breeds grace towards everyone. And when I fail, I get a do-over again and again, endless opportunities.
We Americans are strikingly individualistic, even inventing self-contradictory proverbs to make our point. “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” we say as though sheer effort can somehow overturn the law of gravity. This outlook even molds our view of spirituality, which we see as something personal and private, between me and God. We turn what is quintessentially a collective, integrated, synergistic venture–the church–into a gathering of individuals, largely disconnected personally. Henry doesn’t know that John’s marriage is crumbling or that Karen’s fifth grader is desperately struggling with depression.
This individualistic mindset is especially detrimental to grace. Grace, like patty-cakes, is not something we can do on our own. It is not something we “claim,” but something we are given… there must be another to offer us grace. Gifts are never earned or won or conquered or they would cease to be gifts. It is true that all grace originates with God, but his primary means of delivering that grace to us is through people. We are all bearers of his light of grace, sharing our small, flickering flame with those whose wick has whiffed out. God came down to us once in flesh that could touch and hear and comfort us, but that was 2000 years ago, and since then, his body has taken on the form of our fellow humans.
This it at once a great responsibility and an amazing privilege–to be the voice and hands and heart of God to our fellows, and them to us. None of us do it perfectly, perhaps not even particularly well, but we each have an indispensable role to play in the redemptive journey we are all on together. We depend on each other for our core heart needs to be met, and we suffer deeply when we cannot connect in mutually supportive relationships. Failing those redemptive relationships, we must do our best to welcome with hope those small tastes of it, the little gestures of goodwill that come our way.
I am not a gracious person by nature. Among other flaws, I have a strong undertow of anger that side-eyes anyone who steps outside the bounds. Just yesterday I accelerated from a stop light and then slowed into the left turn lane when a car darted out from a gas station to my left, forcing me to swerve. He was trying to beat the traffic coming the opposite way, no doubt expecting me to keep accelerating so that he could swing in behind me. He stopped, straddling lanes in both directions, and as I passed, I raised my hand at him and mouthed “WHAT?!”
As much as I treasure grace, it is not my default. My go-to is still legalism and anger and judgment. They are reflexive both in me and at others, and I have to talk myself out of it, like explaining for the hundredth time to a child why he shouldn’t chase the ball into the street. It takes hundreds of explanations not because he misunderstands or disagrees, but because in that moment he’s fixated on the ball. Unfortunately, some undercurrents in us are more complex or more rooted or more hidden. Anger and blame were a moral right in our family when I was growing up so I don’t even have that self-conscious check in my spirit–it doesn’t feel wrong. It wasn’t baked into my conscience as guilt inducing… or rather it was baked into my conscience as legitimate and righteous, unless it is excessive.
But if I conclude that my problem is simply an excess–that irritation is okay, but not spitting–then legalism wins. I reduce everything to behavior and never bother to ask the vital question, “Why do I feel so angry?” My anger or my expression of it is not the real problem, but the symptom, like a check engine light.
In this case, the diagnosis is complex. I have bought into a legalistic system in which we all live within certain parameters, and we keep one another in line by penalizing line-breakers: shirkers, cheaters, moochers, and bad drivers. I work hard to stay within the lines, knowing the whole system will collapse if we don’t all conform, so I am heavily invested in everyone following the rules.
I’m not curious about why they cross the line. Perhaps they lay down the lines differently or they are dodging the opposite line or they don’t prioritize this line. Maybe they are struggling too much to care about lines. All of that looks like so many bad excuses to me–get back in line and then we’ll talk about your issues. This overriding sense of legalistic suppression comes out against myself also in self-condemnation for crossing lines, especially if it hurts or inconveniences others.
I absorbed my dad’s view that it was personally insulting for someone to cross the line in a way that blocked our goals or intentions. It showed that they disrespected us, not caring how their behavior impacted us, which poked at our insecurity in our behavior-based worth. Since we were unaware of our anger except under occasional provocations, we blamed the other for “making us angry” as though anger came from outside and not from within as self-defense against a perceived slight. Seen empathetically, my anger is a cry of fear that my very worth is being threatened by every assumed mistreatment–I must judge you to deflect my own sense of inadequacy.
Sadly, it is this very judging that maintains the legalistic system that keeps me running from my shame and away from grace. Not only when I am mean, but every time I do something stupid or careless or off-kilter, I shame myself into better efforts because I am sure that doing it right is the measure of my worth. And with that system, I judge the worth of others by what they do. We are all trapped, and keep each other trapped, like crabs in a bucket that keep pulling down the ones trying to escape. Grace is all of a piece–we all get it or none of us do. When we start measuring out who is “worthy” of grace, we have slipped back into legalism again. So giving grace to other drivers (or neighbors or colleagues), real grace, not forced and grudging but free and affirming, is my best path to accepting grace for myself as well. Let grace reign.
I drove to work after my last blog with my soul percolating in anticipatory tension. Patience on the road is not my strong suit anyway. I was gunning, braking, and swerving my way down the freeway, muttering about all the stupid and pigheaded folks who drove in the left lane as if they were the lead car in a funeral procession, when I realized my adrenaline rush was going to turn the workplace into a war zone. I pulled into the right lane to settle down and set my heart in a better direction to cope with the fire-sale crowds at the paint counter.
Fearing the impatience of my customers made me defensively more impatient with my fellow drivers. When I accept impatience towards me as legitimate, internalize that criticism as justified and blame myself as inadequate, I become a shareholder in a legalistic system, and with that system, I justify my own impatience towards others. Slowness, incompetence, and bungling are never in themselves cause for incrimination. We tend to see these as willful negligence, an intentional disregard, because we are frustrated and looking for someone to blame. But the court of our mind cries out for consistency so that we must also blame ourselves when our missteps impede others’ plans.
In this way results, not intentions, become the basis for judgment, and we buy into a distinctly American morality that sees success as the inevitable reward of diligence and hard work. Mistakes, especially repeated mistakes, are the sign of moral decay or personal defect. We offer “grace” for a certain level of deficiency and stuff down our impatience, but cross that line and we pull out our corrective ruler to slap your hand for not living up to our expectations. Yet grace that fits within a quota is not real grace, which is endless, and its goal is not meeting expectations, but giving us the fullest life possible.
Unfortunately, like all forms of legalism, impatience used by us or against us is all of one piece, mutually reinforcing. My impatience towards others forces me to accept their impatience towards me and vice versa. If I do not live in a world of self-deception in which I am the definer of what expectations are legitimate (namely the ones I meet), then I live in world in which I am always trying to validate my worth. I am driven to perfectionism in which I am my own worst accuser, and my only defense is to pull others to my level by pointing out their failures.
Our society is constantly reinforcing this legalistic worldview. Each time I make a mistake in mixing paint, I feel like I need to somehow justify myself or prove to my supervisor that I have constructed a system to avoid that mistake in the future. But I am human. I get distracted or confused. In the hubbub I forget to take necessary precautions. I will keep making mistakes, and I need to find a way to support myself in my own mind, to be patient with myself. Remarkably, I find that leaning into grace for myself helps me lean into grace for others as well. And when I use my impatience of others to confront my own legalistic worldview and push myself back towards a grace perspective, it rebounds to an easier grasp of grace towards myself.
I think I need to spend more time in the slow lane.
He phoned in hot about getting the wrong color paint, kept interrupting, and demanded that I make him more paint–the right paint–NOW so he could pick it up the same night or the morning after. It was the kind of treatment that sears the soul, and it ruined the rest of my night. He came in the next morning and apologized. The gray-scale photocopy he used to select his paint was inaccurate. He felt bad for getting angry and blaming me when it was his own mistake.
I have been in that situation many times–angry and blaming someone else for my own faults. Sometimes I discovered my error too late to apologize, and I think back on those occasions with deep shame and sorrow for the wounding I caused. But humble apologies can’t fix everything–the wounding for which I apologize can keep festering, hurt the relationship, and spread out to harm others. I feel just as wary of my apologetic customer today as yesterday, and that wariness spreads over onto other customers who might also lose their temper. I now feel an unhealthy degree of anxiety about making mistakes, and that makes me more likely to judge the mistakes of my colleagues. It is a subtle change, often subconscious, but it taints the air.
On their face, apologies seem to be expressions of grace, but they can just as easily come from legalism and will then often spawn further ungracious ripples. My customer was primarily chagrined about his wrong evaluation, not his anger. If I really had mixed the wrong paint, he would have felt justified in being angry–I wasted his time and money with my carelessness. In other words, he was following a strict legal code–fault deserves anger, the greater the fault the greater the righteous anger. He saw his failure as misapplying the legal code, in this case his anger was unjustified. In contrast, grace says we all fail so let’s be patient with each other’s mistakes. Just say no to anger, even when the other person really is at fault.
So many times I have been chagrined in this same legalistic way. Instead of learning to be more gracious and less angry with other’s mistakes, I take home the lesson that I need to be more accurate in assigning blame. In other words, faced with a challenge to my legalistic ways, I become more entrenched in them.
A few days ago I was passing a long line of cars backed up in the exit lane. Just ahead two cars in my lane had slowed to a crawl, trying to merge into the stopped lane. The traffic to my left was going too fast for me to shift over. It seemed clear to me that the two blocking my lane had decided they didn’t want to wait in the long exit lane and had sped ahead to cut in line farther up. Because of the unexpected jam, I was running late for work, and getting irritated at the lane cheaters, I lay on my horn.
There are two possibilities: they were innocent or guilty. If they were being selfish, my anger was justified, but if innocent, then I was at fault. Simple math: the guilty are punished and the innocent are not… until we add in forgiveness which ruins the equation. We all need forgiveness, repeatedly. It is the oil that smooths our many faults in relating to each other. Grace is not only sweeter than law, but far more powerful to transform us, both those who give it and those who receive it, because it works to change the heart, not the behavior. Since grace defines our motivations, not our actions, it can reveal itself in tough as well as gentle ways, but it is always an act of blessing… and anger is usually not.
Two weeks ago, having failed to find another job, I moved from a part time position in appliance sales at Home Depot to full time in the paint department. I was stacking paint last night on a high shelf and dropped a gallon can of shellac-based primer. It crashed to the floor, covering my shoes, my pants, a six-foot stretch of aisle, and splattering all the products on the bottom shelf. Herbert, an assistant manager, came to help me clean things up, and as we soaked up the puddles, the rest of it dried hard. It was well past closing time by then, so we had to stop, leaving a note for the morning crew.
I hate to make a mess that I can’t fix myself, especially if someone else is then forced to deal with my mistakes. It’s especially hard when others are resentful or critical–their feeling is understandable, even justifiable, and I have no means of rectifying it. Today I have a low-level hum of dis-ease as thoughts about it keep circulating up to my consciousness and then subsiding again. It is my day off, so I can’t even apologize in person (although I did in the note).
What strikes me as especially sad is my tendency to feel bad even when the other person seems gracious, as everyone at my job has been. I find it so hard to trust grace. I’m sure they’re just being nice outwardly but have ticked a black check by my name. They think, “He owes me,” or “He can’t be trusted,” or some such ungracious reaction… probably make wry comments in the break room. I feel so much safer with others when I can skirt my need for grace and just prove myself by hard work.
But “safer” here is a feeling based on good performance reviews, which is a legalistic trap. It means that I continue to value myself (and others) by our effectiveness and only turn to grace as a last resort, a “grace of the gaps.” But when legalism is the daily currency, it shapes our whole mindset and relationships. If grace is only the fall-back, we are still operating out of a legalistic mindset in which only the failing require grace. I don’t realize how easily I slip into this mindset until I am the one screwing up and in need of grace. My failures become an invitation into a worldview of grace.
So often I respond to others’ failures with this stop-gap grace. I reflexively judge their failing because gracious thoughts do not come naturally to me. So when I realize my unkind thoughts, I try to force myself to think differently, push away the critical thoughts and talk myself into being accepting of their faults. “They don’t know any better,” I say, or “They aren’t good at planning ahead.” The underlying assumption is that “good” people like me don’t need grace, at least not much, but these unfortunates need grace. I only pull out the grace card when it is needed, but am quite content to otherwise live with a legalistic mindset.
But true grace knows no hierarchy or proportion, giving itself fully to everyone. Certainly exercising grace is more difficult in some situations and with some people than others. It is much easier to give grace to an apologetic person than an angry one, but both are in equal need of grace as is the person who did not mess up at all (though grace may present itself differently in each case). In fact, it is the the one who rarely screws up that is probably in “more” need of grace than the others, for she is much more likely to be blind to grace and her need of it. Either grace is the lifeboat we only use when someone falls out of the ship of a performance-based worldview, a way to accommodate misfits and failures, or grace is the ship in which we choose to sail.
I want more and more to learn to see the world with a grace mindset. When I am challenged by my own failings or by my judgmentalism of others’ failings, I don’t want to apply grace like a bandaid to help us through that moment, but I want it to be a reminder of the worldview I wish to wholly embrace where grace is the engine and the rudder and the compass. I have a long way to go. May I use my blunders as stepping stones to grow in my commitment to grace and not see them as challenges to try harder to earn my worth.
Today between the rows of stoves in Home Depot’s appliance department, I asked a couple if I could help them. They told me they had just moved from out of town, were buying a new house, and needed appliances. I soon discovered he had jumped mid-life from the business world into repairing musical instruments, which is his first love. They had moved here two weeks ago, and he had a fully functioning business up and running. I was astonished—how did he build up a clientele so quickly?
“Oh,” he replied, “a local man was retiring, and I saw his ad—a full shop of tools and a full client list of customers. That’s why we moved here. I didn’t even have to pay for the business. The man was retiring and just handed it over to me!”
He had been looking all over the country, but this shop just happened to be in the town where his wife grew up, so the couple was staying with her father until they could buy a house. I asked if it was hard to get a loan for the house since he was self-employed in a new business in a new location, which might seem risky to a bank.
“No,” he said, “my wife has been working an internet job for 15 years (which she can do from anywhere) so the bank gave her the loan.”
Having recently moved here myself, our contrast was sharp. I have a part-time job for which I have no love, which doesn’t pay enough, and which can’t possibly support a bank loan for a house. Everything fell into place magically for this couple while Kimberly and I struggle to make ends meet in jobs neither of us want, making do with an over-priced, under-sized rental in a bad neighborhood, and without friends or family with whom to connect. Where’s our magic?
Such sharp contrasts do not make me angry or bitter, but they often make me hopeless and depressed. I don’t know how to make life work for us. But this time I knew God was punking me. He’d set me up for this by giving me just the insight I needed this morning to trust him in what he was dragging me through. I knew that our tough road was creating a unique work of God in my soul. His magic wand was out, not pointed at my circumstances but at me. I was the magic he was making, and sometimes a magic brew calls for frog toenails and lizard poop.
We scrimp, we jerry-rig, we do without to make ends meet. The driver’s window in my truck has been broken for two years… purposely in the down position so that it can pass inspection. The rain pours in on the seat and floor and cups in the door pocket, then it dries out again… the door handle has started to rust tight. My wheelbarrow is a 55 gallon barrel that I scavenged, cut in half, and bolted to a lawn mower chassis. I buy my clothes from Goodwill, keep my shoes till the insoles wear through to the pavement, and cut my own hair.
I piece together my income from various sources. 8 months out of the year I work part time at a college library and try to make up the summer months with cutting lawns. I also work at Home Depot part time year round. I tried also working as a substitute custodian in the Lynchburg school system, but I rarely could make it fit between the hours of my other two job schedules. Kimberly is usually working as well in a low-pay job. We have somehow managed over the last 6 years, occasionally dipping into our meager savings.
Since we have not been able to find better jobs here, we decided to try our luck in Asheville, NC where Kimberly has wanted to move for years. We put our house up for sale in April, hoping to sell it this summer. Since I was busy fixing the house in preparation, I had to cancel my mowing jobs for the summer. Kimberly also left her job, partly in anticipation of moving. Now it has been three months without an offer on our house, and we have exhausted our savings on getting the house ready, our only income being my part time job at Home Depot. My first paycheck from the library is still two months away.
We put Kimberly’s student loan payment on hiatus, postponed eye doctor visits, and cut our food budget in half. Then we started brainstorming about how to make it through two more months of bills. I had some vacation time from the library I could collect in wages (I usually use it to cover the Thanksgiving break gap in pay). We could take a cash advance on our credit card (with a hefty interest rate). I could take a loan from my retirement fund. But borrowing from the future only works if you have some prospect of improvement–neither of us have jobs lined up in Asheville. Kimberly had added up our average monthly bills, and even with my vacation pay, we weren’t going to make it through.
Over the weekend we started smelling a strange stench all through the house. On monday I discovered that it was our hot water heater which had rusted through.
That same day we received an envelope from my dad’s widow with a check from my father’s estate, enough to get us through the summer and restore some of the savings we had spent on fixing up the house, including a new hot water heater. Isn’t that just like God?
We humans are deeply flawed. The Bible calls it sin, the evil and brokenness that infests our whole world, right down to the roots of our own heart. It not only distorts our hearts, but our minds, our volition, our self-understanding… it taints every part of who we are. One of the primary ways this plays out is to make each of us the center of our own universe, both perceptually and morally. We have a default to justify ourselves while blaming others.
Self justification may at first glance seem like self compassion, being on my own side, but it is really a Trojan horse, the gift that keeps on taking, because it is rejection of the truth, and that never leads to health and strength. Fleeing our shame makes us no freer than the prison escapee who is running for his life. Our only hope is to embrace our shame, our failings, our faults, with the arms of grace, to openly confess our flaws from within the safety of God’s unconditional love.
I’m sorry to say that I often find it easier to see the failing of others than my own, and to then fault them for it as a moral flaw. But fixing that tendency to blame others by trying instead to justify them leads to equal disorder in our minds and hearts and relationships. Grace ceases to be grace when it avoids the truth. Being generous-minded (assuming the best rather than the worst) certainly has its place, especially if our default is to blame (as mine sadly is), but our aim is to seek out what is true, not what is nice. Flattery is deadly, especially when it is sincere.
Our response to our parents often falls into this unfortunate dichotomy–we either blame them or exonerate them, justify ourselves or justify them, and both responses are equally damaging. In the complexity of processing through our emotional entanglements, we will likely go through stages of both blaming and justifying, I certainly did, but these should never be an end in themselves. We seek to know ourselves through the dynamics of our early upbringing so as to find truth and freedom in which to grow forwards. Things need to be unlearned or re-organized or re-evaluated or put into perspective. Getting stuck in blame or justification cuts off true transformation.
One key tool in growing into a gracious outlook towards others is to separate the impact of someone’s behavior from its sinfulness. To say that my father or mother impacted me in a certain way is quite distinct from saying that they are to blame. They may have been doing the best they could. We do not ultimately know what internal resources they did or did not have, the motivations for their choices, and so on. “To his own Master he stands or falls.” However, we have the emotional and spiritual obligation to carefully evaluate behavior as itself beneficial or harmful, otherwise we will mindlessly carry on those relational patterns into our own families by adopting them or by reactively adopting their opposite.
Janathan Grace Reflections 