Grace Hurts

As someone who has been a Christian nearly her whole life, I’ve never thought all that much about just what grace is. We all know the text book definition—mercy is withholding a deserved punishment, and grace is undeserved favor—God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. We know that, and we listen to sermons on it regularly. But having grown up a “good girl” and having always known God’s grace in my life, I’ve never truly appreciated just what grace can look like to someone who’s never experienced it before.

I recently started a new job—I’m now an administrative assistant in a rail car repair shop (yes, my professional career has been varied—that’s a whole different topic). I’ve been there about 2 ½ months now, and I’m discovering a profound irony—at my previous 2 jobs, I lived in paralyzing fear of messing up, yet I never once did any of the things that I was so terrified of. In this job, I’m not afraid, yet I’ve messed up a couple of things pretty thoroughly. And still, I don’t live in fear of making mistakes anymore. The difference? Grace.

When I started this job, my new boss told me, “you can’t make a mistake I haven’t made before,” and various people told me roughly the same thing—that I would make mistakes, and that they were ALWAYS fixable.  I’ll admit, I didn’t believe them.  I was pretty sure I could avoid making mistakes. After all, I’m smart, I’m competent. I’ll be fine.

Did you know that mixing up one letter on a part number makes it an entirely different part? Or that automated reservation systems don’t tell you that the facility closes 15 minutes after your appointment so you’d better not be late? I didn’t.  And when I realized those mistakes, I felt absolutely terrible. I’d screwed up, I’d gotten it wrong… there had to be some way I could fix it.

Well, no. There wasn’t. The only way for the mess I’d made to be fixed was for me to hand it over to someone else who had far more experience than I did, and let them deal with it. And it was so much harder than I ever expected it to be. I’d made the mess; I should be the one to have to clean it up. I’m a responsible person. It was the most counter-intuitive thing I have had to do in a long time.

And I realized that just as the people I work with took on my problem to fix the mess I’d made, so God takes on the mess our sin makes and fixes it. And I think I’m beginning to realize why some of the most incredibly smart people reject salvation—because grace can be incredibly hard to accept. To accept grace is to admit that I am incapable of fixing the problem, of making up for the whole convoluted tangle I’ve created.  I would much rather untangle everything myself , fix it, and hand it back all neatly wrapped up. But I can’t, and admitting that hurts. It’s one thing to admit you made a mistake, and another entirely to own the fact that you’ve done such a good job at making the mistake that you can’t fix it. When you “should” know better, have the skills to fix it, be smart enough, competent enough, and you just can’t… well, it’s galling. And it doesn’t end there! Not only do I have to admit I can’t fix it, I have to relinquish my responsibility for the end result. If I keep going back to the mess and trying to fix it again, I just tangle things up worse. Once I’ve passed the mess over to the person who can fix it, I have to let them fix it. And when we accept God’s grace, we have to relinquish our control over the result of our mess.  If we only accept it in bits and pieces, or keep trying to hold on to the things we think we can fix, we end up making more of a mess.

There’s a second aspect to this as well—the people who extend grace. Do you know who is most likely to be gracious? Who is most likely to be competent to clean up my mess? Someone who has been in my shoes, understands the mess I’ve made, and knows exactly how to fix it. Jesus became human so that He could be the perfect Atonement, yes, but I’m understanding more and more that He also became human so that He could understand our mistakes. To extend grace is to accept responsibility for the clean-up of someone else’s mess. There’s no point if you don’t know how to clean. Don’t worry, I’m not implying that Jesus wasn’t sinless. However, in His human life, He understood human messes, trials, and disappointments—and I’m beginning to think that was so that He could more perfectly extend grace to the minutiae of our lives. Because that’s the beautiful thing about God’s grace—that it isn’t simply a ticket to Heaven, but a reconciling of ourselves to Him and to all the others that our sin has messed up.

Or in my case, it’s the fact that there wasn’t a restocking fee.