Here’s a try-hard girl dishing out common-sense grace! Interwoven in her story is divorce, cancer, parenting teens, blending families, and fostering children while working outside the home. I love Michele because she’s funny, down-to-earth, and loves Jesus a crazy amount.
How did you move away from performing for your worth and toward receiving grace?
The question is written in the past tense, which implies I’ve already accomplished that movement from “earning” toward “receiving.” But the truth is this is an ongoing process, a daily (at times moment-by-moment) intentional decision to move one direction over the other.
My natural bent is to be an achiever, a pleaser, an earner. However, those efforts always leave me empty in the long run. The one thing that finally pushed me toward grace over effort is the fact that I became utterly exhausted. I had nothing left to give. Nothing left to try in order to be “good enough.” All my efforts still left me lacking. And that’s when I started to understand that I was never meant to BUILD an identity; I was meant to RECEIVE it.
What would you say to encourage the woman who isolates herself from feeling her hurt and pain by being busy, by looking for outside recognition, or by always trying harder?
Pain will not be ignored. You can bury it and hide it for a time. But it must be dealt with. It’s a powerful indicator that we need to pay attention and honor an important part of ourselves. The longer you ignore it, the louder its voice becomes. Like a wound or cancer that festers without attention, pain eats away at a person until it consumes. The only way to heal pain is to tend it, honor it. Then, pain can be transformed into a powerful teacher and conduit of growth and health.
How has God helped you trust His grace and love for you?
Time and experience. By proving Himself faithful in the middle of my pain, over and over again. If my life had never been hard, I wouldn’t have experienced or believed the tenacity of God’s love. Just as we don’t know the reliability of a boat until it’s in deep water, we don’t know the strength of God’s promises until we’re in a position where they’re proved true.
What counsel would you give to the woman who wants to move away from working for her worth and toward a life of rest and grace?
Grace is counter-intuitive. It makes no sense, seems too good to be true. Our flesh will always drag us toward trying to earn our own saving. That means, to move from working for worth toward receiving it, we’ll need to fight the current of our nature. It needs to be an intentional and daily practice, to realign our thinking with Truth. This is even more difficult in a culture that applauds effort and success and constantly makes us aware of what we lack.
If we’re assaulted by false messages about our worth both internally and externally, then we need to be flooding ourselves with what God says about us. That means, again and again, going to God’s word to read, believe, memorize God’s words over us. That’s precisely what I Am: A 60-Day Journey to Knowing Who You Are Because of Who He Is
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What one (or two!) piece of encouragement would you give to the women who’s living with an imperfect, unexpected life, but wants to make peace with it?
Just because life is hard, doesn’t mean it’s not good. And just because we don’t understand God, doesn’t mean HE’S not good. For decades, I operated under the wrong expectations of both my life and my God. I believed that if I worked hard enough and was good enough, I’d be rewarded with a near-perfect life. In other words, if I was a good enough person, God OWED ME. Thus, any difficulty or hardship I experienced was a reflection of my own failure or lack of worth.
It just doesn’t work that way. We can do everything right and still end up with a life that’s “wrong.” We are imperfect people living with other imperfect people on an imperfect planet. However, life doesn’t have to be idyllic to be good. Once I changed this perspective, I could finally see possibility. After all, sometimes life’s greatest stories are written right in the middle of a mess.