We don’t earn acts of Grace!
Posted by docapc at 1:19 am
I was cycling the other day, near our summer home along the beautiful coast of Maine with a wonderful long time friend. As we passed thunderous waves he turned to me and said, “You work so hard you have earned this, I’m so glad for you”. He was surprised that I disagreed that I “had earned this” and immediately thought I was being self critical. He was mistaken in that I wasn’t feeling self critical at all, just realistic from my point of view. I know many people, friends and clients, who have worked as hard as I have and they have died of prostate cancer, breast and uterine cancer, and some are terminally at the moment. They have earned this good fortune as much or more than I. I think when we grow up with a negative story about ourselves we tend to have a punitive self voice. We believe that our fate in life is due to our achievements, our successes and when things don’t go well we feel less than, as if we failed and didn’t perform as well as we should. This attitude puts us at the center of all life circumstances, it makes us mistakenly think our lives and the lives of those close to us are exclusively dependent on our actions. We are therefore never in a position to accept acts of grace. Grace comes are way not because of what we do or what we don’t do. It is a variable some believe is directed by God, others believe it is the Universe directing our fate. I will leave the potential debate as to the causal agent of grace to theologians who possess far more wisdom than I in this matter.
The critical point for our purposes is that we are often not in control of the circumstances that effect our lives. When self criticism is an integral part of your self voice is it hard to accept that you are not always accountable for the direction of your life. If you were held overly accountable early in life, made to feel unrealistically responsible for others this tendency can be crippling and needs to change for you to feel emotionally liberated.
Life, to a certain degree is like the weather. It is a beautiful day today, sun is shining, and the sea is glistening. I have been given, through grace, a beautiful day. I didn’t earn it, nor would I be responsible if it were raining. I am, of course, not implying that we have no control, just that we do not have ultimate control. We need to be able
to distinguish what comes under our roof and what does not. I refer you to chapter 5 in “The Curse of the Capable, Loosen the Rains and Lift the Burden-Control” for further study if you wish.
