Grace and The Middle Path

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of Grace lately. In the context of what it looks like to receive it, and also in the context of how to give it to others, and how to give it to yourself more. 

I always do this thing at the beginning of every new year and I choose a theme or word for the year, this year my word is Grace - and boy, have I come back to it again and again. It’s been fascinating to see how the word or theme I choose coincides with just what I need. Last year, I chose the word Harmony, and it was fitting with all the things that I needed to cut out of my life that were causing some dissonance. 

The year before that, I chose the phrase Vibrantly Serve, and that was so neat because I was building my coaching business and nurturing it from its roots, as I went all in with serving, the practice grew to a sweet spot where I feel so happy about being able to help as many people as possible while I get to serve through doing something I love to do. 

But this year, the word I chose is Grace, and this was back in January. Many of my students and clients love this word of the year practice, so stay tuned as we approach the holidays, I send out all kinds of ideas and fun ways you can engage in this word of the year practice, and make it fun. 

But Let me ask you this: have you noticed how In the world of self-improvement, there seems to be two camps when it comes to how you approach becoming a better version of yourself. There is the camp who says you have to hold yourself accountable and set high expectations, and if you fall short, you evaluate where you’re missing it and you draw upon grit or you develop grit. This camp has its useful application but it can be a slippery slope for falling into the trap of being hard on yourself and never measuring up. Then, in the other camp, some people say you have to be compassionate and kind with yourself, and some people think that is a soft approach,  and so its pitfalls include being too lax and never getting out of your comfort zone. 

And so which is it?  

This is a somewhat black and white approach, these two camps, and while there is merit to both of these points of view, what I like to do, and I help my students do, is operate somewhere in the middle, and blend both accountability and grit with giving yourself some grace when dealing with shortcomings in ourselves or with others. I call it the middle path. I’m going to teach you what that looks like today. Because It’s so much more useful to employ Grace as a skill in our relationship with ourselves - and with others. 

But what I’ve found is, grace is confusing. 

Let me explain: If I were to ask you, what is Grace? How would you answer? What would you say to me if I didn’t have any idea of the concept of Grace, how would you teach me about it? What words would you use to describe it to me? 

These are the questions that I’ve been asking for a long time that won’t leave my mind. And I’ve been diving into some really neat sources to understand Grace in a deeper way, I want to share with you what I’ve discovered.

What I’ve noticed, as I’ve asked different people what Grace means to them, they have insights into grace that have enriched my understanding, and I’ve also noticed they use other words to describe it, words like Mercy, Power, the Love of God, Strength, and I love all of those words, but if you couldn’t use any of those words and had to just describe grace in and of itself, how would you describe it? Similar to asking someone to describe the taste of salt without using the word salty.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot because in my work, I’ve noticed many of us are too hard on ourselves, and we are too hard on other people. It’s hard to give ourselves grace, often when we need it the most. And it’s hard to give other people grace. And when I’m working with a client and they are telling me about a difficult relationship, I feel a lot of love for everyone in their story. I love everyone in the story. It’s a love that is bigger than me, and I think it’s a gift from a higher source, from God honestly, because it hasn’t always been this way. I don’t know that I come by that naturally. But I think everyone in the relationship needs a lot of grace in order to move forward. But it can be so hard to give, both to ourselves, and to other people who maybe don’t deserve it. 

And I say maybe, because this is what I’m learning about Grace. I’m finding that it is something that is given when it isn’t always deserved, when someone hasn’t earned it, or when in fact, they fall short and there isn’t a logical reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Let me explain what I mean by that.

I’m going to start with a story. Well, a few short stories, and then we’ll tie them all together. 

Here’s the first story: There was this girl in highschool, she struggled with ADHD, she didn’t know it at the time though, they didn’t have a lot of awareness for it back then, she just knew it was hard to keep track of dates and times, and she always seemed to be forgetting things. 

She had a really important test coming up, she didn’t know the gravity of this test, but she had heard her teachers tell her that if she did well on the test, it could set her up for scholarship money and it could make or break her college career.

One Friday night, she stayed out late with her girlfriends, and one of her friends called her late after she’d crawled in bed and asked if she could  get  a ride to the local university to take the ACT in the morning. She said, Yes, of course! And she picked up her friend before the sunrise, they made it to take the important test just in time, she even skipped breakfast, but she said a little prayer and asked God to help her with this all-important test that could determine the rest of her life. 

She later learned she did in fact do well on that test and it did open doors for her. She was able to get a scholarship and she knew that something bigger than herself helped her take that test she was in no way prepared for. 

My question for you is: did she receive grace? And if so, Did she deserve it? 

Hold onto that thought, and let’s go into the second story…

Second Story: There was a woman who was caught in the very act and thrown into the dirt by angry men, their anger would have been difficult to be on the receiving end of, pointing fingers, shouting, gathering a crowd, causing a lot of attention. And according to their laws, if you were caught doing, it could be grounds for capital punishment, you could be stoned. And so I imagine this woman in the dirt to be very uncomfortable, physically because she’s in the dirt and there are angry men all around her and they’re shouting and pointing their fingers at her, and spiritually uncomfortable because she probably knew the laws. And she’s being accused in front of everyone. Nothing about this is a private matter. 

And so in the text, it says that Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground while all the people are shouting and asking him what should be done. And as they continued to ask him, he lifted himself up, and said to them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down.”

And all of them heard him say this, their own consciences were moved, and they left one by one until it was just the woman and Jesus left alone in the courtyard. 

I want to stop right there for a second and point out two things that strike me in this story. First, it’s that Jesus met this woman where she was, he went to her level and stooped down to be with her in the dirt, maybe so he could look into her eyes, look into her face. I love that. And then second, He knew she was guilty, but gave her the benefit of the doubt as we like to say. And so would you say this woman received Grace? 

Third Story: There was a dad who had a son who would rage, he’d throw fits and get angry, and it sounds like in the text, this had been going on for quite a long time. 

The dad brought his son to Jesus and asked Jesus to heal his son. Jesus said, ‘Yes, if you can believe I can do it.’ The dad said, Yes - l believe You can! But help me with my unbelief.” And that tells me that the dad was having a hard time even doing that, even believing. He still had doubt in his mind and somewhere in his heart, which I can relate to. And even though I believe in a Jesus who can do miracles, I also have doubts and wonder if He will, and if so, why hasn’t He yet… I know many of you ask these same kinds of questions inside.  

And if you know how the story goes, you know that the son was healed from that very hour. And so my question for you is this: Did this dad deserve grace? Did the son? And the girl taking the test and being unprepared, and the woman caught in the very act, the dad who even though he wanted to believe, he couldn’t really even do that, and I don’t blame him: did these people in these stories deserve  grace? 

And if you answered yes, then the next question I’ve been wondering about is:

Is it ever okay to pass judgment on ourselves? Or on someone else? And if so, what does that look like? In the circumstance where we’re passing judgment on ourselves or on others, is it helping the situation improve, or is it making it worse for the person who is having a hard time? What role do you want to take on in that person’s story who is having a hard time? Do you want to be the Accountability Holder or the Giver of Grace? 

I think these are good questions to live in and think about and be really intentional on how you would answer. 

But for today, I want to be thinking about Grace without deserving it. 

Here’s what I mean. In the world of self-improvement I feel like, and I realize this is just a thought, this is just a story I believe, but I think Grace is more powerful than being hard on ourselves or on other people. I think Grace is more useful and it leads to better results in the long run. 

If you study human behavior, if you are familiar with the stories in the scriptures and stories of people who do bad things and are trying to improve and become better, you find that in the world of healing and spirituality, there is in fact this thing called Grace. And Grace is amazing. 

And what is so amazing about it when you receive it, when it shows up in your life, you realize how powerful it is and you want to give it to others. So there’s this choice we have when we don’t deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt. We can choose to be the Accountability Holder or we can choose to be the Grace Giver. 

So before I talk about that, let me tell you what to me, being in the middle of personal accountability and being the grace giver looks like and how I like to operate on that middle path when thinking about Grace. I call it the middle path. 

For that first story, the ADHD girl in high school who did no preparation whatsoever for her ACT, and by the way, if you’re wondering who this girl is, and you’re wondering if it is me, you would be correct. For a while, I felt so embarrassed I didn’t try harder or take that test more seriously. And so that would be the accountability camp, using accountability against myself. And remember, the other camp is the soft one, sometimes called the compassionate one, where I might want to dismiss taking any personal responsibility. But the middle path looks like - blending both and pausing, taking stock, and saying to myself: Danielle, you would do well to pay more attention to the things teachers and mentors tell you to prepare for important things, and so moving forward, let’s do that. 

The middle path for the dad who wanted his son healed but had a hard time believing it was possible, the middle path might sound something like: hey, you’ve experienced a miracle, now is a good time to share this kind of grace with others who are in the middle of their suffering and offer compassion to them.

I think it’s hard to know when we should hold ourselves accountable and when we should give ourselves more grace, mainly because we don’t learn it if it hasn’t been modeled for us. 

And sometimes my students will say: “I just don’t know how to talk to myself like that, it feels weird.” And I’m like, “I promise that a part of you inside wants to hear you talk to yourself that way.” We don’t know how, maybe it feels weird because we’re so used to being hard on ourselves. 

Which brings me to the point that you don’t actually have to always be the one who talks to yourself this way. You can ask God to talk to you this way, and you can listen, and when you hear the voice that starts to talk this way to you in your mind, you can listen to it and you can try to believe it. You can choose to believe it. You can write it down. I think It comes down to choosing which voices in our heads to listen to. 

And here’s why I want to share this with you. I’ve been to four funerals these past few months, a couple of them were friends of mine and my husbands around our same age, and one of them was my dad, and that’s been really hard, it’s been really sad honestly. So I’ve had to put some things on the backburner, but wanting to keep doing all the things I do and be all the things I am to all the people. oh, and by the way,  I'm the funeral singer. You’ve heard of the wedding singer, I’m the funeral singer. I actually love doing it, I feel like it is such a privilege and an honor, and I don’t treat it lightly to get to sing for family of friends and loved ones who’ve passed on. 

And one night as I was helping my family and extended family prepare for my dad’s funeral, I was exhausted emotionally, physically, in all the ways you can be tired, because nothing makes you so exhausted as grief does, right? Have you noticed this? And it was late, late, like 1am, or maybe even 2am in the morning, I had to write my talk, and I heard the words in my mind, “your talk is already written. Go to bed, get some rest. Don’t worry about this. I’ve got you.”

And my knee jerk response was to dismiss it and to push through and write my talk. 

But I heard the words again. And I decided to believe them. I had a choice. I could believe this voice of Grace, or I could push through and try to do it on my own. 

I chose to go to bed, which isn’t in my nature. But I did it, I went to bed. I set my alarm. The voice told me to set my alarm for an hour later, and to rest. So I did. I listened to the Grace voice. In the morning when I got up, I felt so much better physically, and sure enough, that talk wrote itself in less than half an hour. It was grace. 

And I keep learning this lesson over and over. Grace is available. It’s always available if we choose to use it. If we choose to listen. If we choose to hear it. It’s available even if we think we need to do more, if we think we need to be more. It’s available even if we don’t think we deserve it. It’s amazing. 

We don’t have to wonder if we’re worthy to receive it, if we’ve done enough, even though many of us believe that we only can receive it after checking certain boxes. I know this is a common belief about grace, and there is some truth that we are going to need to put forth effort. But I wonder if we’re over-emphasizing the effort part and underemphasizing the generosity part. 

Because what were the check boxes, the “all she could do” with the teenager in high school with ADHD? She didn’t do anything to deserve it. Her all she could do was not a whole lot. But after she received it, you bet she wanted to do better.

And what was the “all she could do” for the woman caught in the very act? She received grace for sure, and maybe her all she could do was believe the One who is the Giver, and not run away and hide, but she stayed, and listened to what He had to say once everyone else went away. Perhaps THAT was her ‘all she could do.’

And what about the dad whose son is suffering, wasn’t he already doing all he could do? 

Because I’m finding the God I am coming to know is very generous. The Grace Giver was so generous with the teenager high school girl with ADHD. And with the woman caught in the very act. And as this dad discovered whose son was healed, grace is available, and he doesn’t even have to earn it. 

And we can learn that grace is always available, we can look for it and we will find it if we are looking. But if it’s hard to find it doesn’t mean we don’t deserve it. 

Grace is generous. There is enough of it to go around. It’s available to everyone. There is no one who isn’t deserving. 

Do you believe that? Do you believe there is no one who isn’t deserving? Or does your mind do that thing mine does, Did your mind go to people like Hitler or Stalin, like mine did when I was first learning that grace is generous? Notice how our brains like to go to extreme examples. 

Aside from bad players in world history, those who commit terrible crimes and murder, for those of us who in no way fit into THAT category, there. is. enough. grace. 

I’m sure there are things we can be doing better to “earn” grace, but THAT is never ending. What if it really is as simple as choosing to accept it when it’s being offered? And have we become so accustomed to relying on our own selves that we miss it in the offering? Do we overlook it? 

And so the question becomes: when do we want to be the Accountability Holder and when do we want to be the Grace Giver or the Grace Receiver? 

I want to offer to you some ideas of what that could look like, and invite you to invite more grace into your story. 

So here are some examples of when you might want to be the Accountability Holder and be more in the Grit camp:

• When you’re learning from mistakes constructively. Being constructive means analyzing  what went wrong and how you can do better next time in a neutral way, not taking the mistake personally or making it mean you are flawed because you made a mistake.
• Or when you’re pushing through a comfort zone and you’re uncomfortable, and you know if you stay where you’re at, you can do the math and see that it won’t help you in the long run. You make a good judgment call, this is different from passing judgment on yourself. 

Here are some examples of when you might want to be giver of grace: 

• Recognizing the dangers of demanding perfection from yourself, being unrealistic.
• Noticing negative self-talk, and actively replacing it with self-compassion, and with some loving kindness and sincere encouragement.
• Or times of stress and fatigue. 
• Also, if you are comparing yourself to others, directing the brain to stay in its own lane and focus on your own personal growth and your own journey as being unique, unlike anyone else's in any way. 

• And I want to address the need to differentiate what you can control and what you cannot. If we’re being hard on ourselves for situations beyond our control, it is not useful. So separating what is in your power and what is not is so useful. 

What I’ve noticed when I can be the Giver of Grace to myself, or when I can recognize grace is being offered to me, either by God, or by someone else, - if I can receive it and choose to accept it, it is more readily available for me to give to other people as well. 

And don’t you think that creates a beautiful feedback loop? 

Can you picture the ripple effect this creates? My guess is this is a much more enjoyable way to enjoy being you, and to enjoy other people. 

The reason I’m a fan of Grace is because like I’ve said earlier, I don’t think any of us are going to achieve self-improvement by being hard on ourselves, especially the parts of it where we believe we don’t deserve grace. Who ever deserves grace? Isn’t that what is inherent in the definition of grace? It’s a gift that none of us deserve. But I am a fan also of showing other people grace and trying to explore what that looks like when they don’t deserve it, because I know it helps me feel better.

But I’m not a fan of being the Judger and thinking I know what’s best for people, or thinking people don’t deserve grace, or punishing them, it feels icky. There might be times where holding people accountable is important. In fact, I know there are those times. But usually when we’re in a position of authority - like being in law enforcement, or a parent teaching a child, or any form of mistreatment or abuse, there are concrete contexts when being the Accountability Holder  is important. But the truth is, you can hold yourself accountable and give yourself grace equally, and same with others. This is the middle path. And a little bit of grace can go a long way. To me, that is where the magic is in enjoying being myself and in enjoying other people even though I let myself down and even though other people let me down. 

We can invite more grace into all of it and we can learn to see it more in our story and in other people’s stories, and as we do, it will create so much more goodness in the world. 

Where are the areas you can be more of a Grace Giver to yourself? Where are the areas you can be more of a grace giver to someone else? Even if you don’t deserve it. Even if they don’t deserve it. How can you recognize where grace is being offered to you that maybe you aren’t seeing? 

And that is what I want to invite you to consider. Because grace is amazing. 

Alright, thanks for joining me today. I love talking about grace. I’ll be over on Instagram, you can message me there if you have questions or insights you want to share with me, I love to hear what you think about these episodes. 

Take care my friends.

Have a beautiful day.