I don’t know what you do when your body is throwing a coup and you go from a few hours of great energy that you pour into unpacking in your new place to more than a few hours in your bed, under blankets, wishing you’d kept that mini fridge and put it in your bedroom to host all the things you need cause your suddenly exhausted with a dash of nausea. I’ll tell you what I do. I get my snacks, the non-refrigeration needing and inclusive of an unpredictable digestive system kind, ease into one of my favorite hoodies that always reminds me of good west coast times and sweats, and I binge watch on Netflix.
I am currently binge watching Longmire. It’s your Law & Order, Blue Bloods, Person of Interest, SWAT, Criminal Minds type show wrapped up in the small midwestern town of Durant, Wyoming. You read that right. Your love a good city girl has been caught up in a rural western show and there is no lead detective or agent, just a sheriff and his three deputies. Oh and there is the Cheyenne Nation tribal police chief and I think he has an officer. Characters have first names like Branch and last names like Standing Bear.
In a recent episode, as the murderer of a bridesmaid is revealed, the woman sobs about how she did everything right. I know, if you’re like me you’re tempted to roll your eyes and think, seriously sweetums, murder is definitely wrong, even if it was an accident, covering it up- wrong. My judgement of her subsided and I was nodding and shedding my own tears. I could absolutely identify with her “I did everything right,” and yet be amid circumstances that clearly went left, off the road, and landed smack in a dusty, dirty, lonely pit. She laid on that gorgeous cognac distressed leather nail head sofa in Sheriff Walt Longmire’s office and sobbed as he confronted her. She covered her face with her petite hands crying as Walt exposed how she and her accomplice uncovered her fiancé having an affair with the bridesmaid whom in a fit of rage she shoved and ultimately died from the notorious “blunt force trauma.” Between well coached and believable sobs she recounted how she led the kind of life that is only supposed to go well, be good (I think she’d settle for at least okay), and right because she did everything (or I am guessing most things) right.
Yet, life just does not go that way. It simply does not go as good, well, or right as we demand when we demand. It has a strange way of giving us good for good, right for right, it’s not an exact science. We love and yet we know well the heartbreak of being unloved. We eat right and still get a host of sicknesses. We pay our bills and as soon as we are let go from a job and seek a new payment plan it’s as if the past 5 years worth of on time payments count for nothing. We decide a life of celibacy and as soon as we do the poole of potential partners gets dryer that the Sahara. We keep that 3.0 average and the one semester where a parent or child is sick, we fall behind, drop to a 2.89, the scholarship is rescinded. We stay faithful in our marriage and yet they are not, and not once, but twice, and we are served the divorce papers and out of a home. We did everything right and yet, here we are with life awry, terribly unright.
In all of our own human goodness and life’s less than goodness, grace, unmerited, unearned, un strived for, unaware of our database of good deeds and rightness, comes, comforts, loves, and takes hold of us. If I am being really honest, really authentic, really vulnerable, really real, I want, no, demand, that grace repay me for all of my rightness. For the years of good grades, obedience, volunteer work, advocacy for injustices, regular 6am workouts, church attendance, tithing, supporting of friends, babysitting, lending money to family and friends. Grace ought to not show up when things stink it should prevent them. I earned that unearned favor and I am calling it in. It’s so human of me, dare I say us. Dare I say that I am not alone in desperately wanting grace to remember me and my goodness and avert ungoodness?
I suppose however, if it did then it would not be grace. I’m not exactly sure what it would be, but it wouldn’t and couldn’t be grace, and for that, I am grateful. The reality is, I’ve also done some things, we’ve also done somethings really wrong. And we don’t seek remembrance, repayment, or acknowledgement for that. We don’t shake our fist at God and demand He see the lies, deceit, the jealousy, lack of integrity, lust, gluttony, etc. and reward us. We don’t give grace the stink eye for not keep tracking of those things. Grace is in our goodness, our not so goodness, our rightness, our not so rightness. It is its nature to be present and be all that we need for any and all moments that we find ourselves in.
My hope this week is that we let go of our demand of grace to see our rightness and reward us, but instead trust grace to help us be alright, come what may. That whatever we face today, tomorrow, this week or next, this month or next, that our grip on the neck of grace loosens and we instead relax into its firm grip of us. Grace has us covered.