Can we all make a collective promise, right now, to try to show ourselves mercy and grace? And can we then have enough mercy and grace to forgive ourselves when we fail in this endeavor?
I have had a really rough time the past two days. I’ve just been in a major funk. I’ve found it hard to function on the level I have wanted to. I’ve been exhausted and overwhelmed and lethargic. I haven’t been very patient, and I look around at all the mess that accumulated over the weekend, and I get down. I feel like I can’t get on top of it. It’s like it sits there taunting me, telling me I’ll never be good enough.
And yet I try to treat people with respect. I try to teach my girls to respect themselves and others. I preach forgiveness to them until I am blue in the face. Before they are even able to speak, I lecture them about the human proclivity towards error and I then urge them to always forgive themselves and always show mercy towards others.
But children have this nasty little habit — they tend to learn from what we do rather than what we say, and they tend to understand more about what we do than we think or wish they do.
And so, of course, that gives me even more reason to beat myself up. Not only in this mindset hurting myself, but it’s slowly sleeping into my girls’ consciousness.
I don’t know about you, but I have an extraordinarily hard time allowing myself grace. I actually actively rebel against it. I fear it more than I fear almost anything.
To me, showing myself grace means complacency. It brings us too close to abandoning our standards. My deepest fear has always been that if I learn to forgive myself, I will give myself permission to act recklessly. I guess deep down I believe that holding myself to strong standards and refusing to allow myself grace for failures actually keeps me in line, and without that, I couldn’t trust myself.
And the ironic part is that the lack of grace actually draws me more deeply into depression and complacency. It makes it harder for me to function how I would like to. And I have a sneaking feeling that it doesn’t do the job of keeping me on track that I think it does.
And so then I go back to my original question.
What if we offered ourselves radical and unconditional grace? What if when we erred, we made our amends, and then we refused to wallow in it or allow ourselves to be defined by it? What if we were active examples of God’s grace in this world?
How would things be different if you did a one week experiment where you refused to judge yourself?
I tend to think our world would be a bit kinder. A bit brighter. And a whole lot gentler.
Ironically, there shouldn’t be anything radical about grace. It should be built into our souls. But it’s not. It gets lost somewhere in this world just like most virtue does.
But if we hold our grace close to our hearts, if we hold on to it as deeply as we hold onto anything, if we distribute it to both ourselves and others with total abandon… well, just think how much more light would surround us. How much freer we would be. How much less encumbered.
It’s a tall task. It requires more of us than we can sometimes give. We won’t find very many examples out in this world of it. It will occasionally make us feel vulnerable and different.
But very rarely can change come without vulnerability, and never can change come when we follow the standards of this world.
Grace can change the world out there, and it can change the world inside our hearts. We just need to trust in it and follow it. It might feel like jumping off a cliff, but my guess is that instead of falling, we will soar.