Every year, two months before her annual physical, my mother began a severe diet.
Most days, no breakfast – or if so, a tiny bowl of cereal. Three egg whites for lunch, or a salad. Next to nothing for dinner. No food she enjoyed. No snacks. No desserts.
She generally lost the weight she wanted to lose. Her biometric numbers generally ended up where she wanted them (although one year the emphasis on “eating almost nothing but watermelon” resulted in abnormally high blood sugar).
After the appointment, she always celebrated with her favorite foods and abandoned the diet of severity. Almost always, the weight came back.
Looking back, I can see evidence of disordered eating in her approach that I also would later inherit. But at the time I mostly marveled at the all-or-nothing strictness of her diet approach. It simply didn’t seem sustainable: we all knew she wouldn’t be eating salads and no breakfast or dinner for the rest of her mortal life. Yet she refused to consider any other, longer-term approach.
I was thinking about this recently during a conversation in a local health group that I’ve joined. Mostly, we’re striving to use science-based approaches to eat better and to move more. Because science-based approaches to better health don’t generally involve severe restrictions or unsustainable diet approaches, we work on incremental things: replacing some of our sugars and fats with vegetables and fruits, increasing protein and drinking more water, balancing our nutrients and minding our portions.
One of the women in our group seems to struggle with this philosophy. Like my mother, she wants severity, austerity, restriction. It’s not enough to stay within the daily recommended allowance for sugar—she wants to eliminate it. Not enough to say “I can have a treat in moderation”—no treats should be allowed at all for someone trying to eat healthily.
Last time we met, our group coach gently inquired if she might be willing to give herself a little grace. Her response, cold and absolute, still haunts me:
Giving yourself “grace” can be a slippery slope.
*****
I didn’t realize I had OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) until I was diagnosed.
Most people think of OCD as a hand-washing compulsion or assume it’s about having to touch a doorknob 42 times before you can enter a room. Certainly, it can manifest in those ways; it also manifests in ways not much like any of these at all. Fundamentally, OCD itself is about performing a behavior (compulsion) to soothe or placate a persistent thought or worry (obsession).
It never occurred to me that rehearsing a PowerPoint for a single presentation 15 times a day, every day, might fall outside the realm of the norm. I assumed everyone read and reread their communications as many times as I did, or went back into the Sent folder over and over and over to make sure everything was just so. I assumed everyone spent hours awake at night rehearsing the presentations they’d given and the communications they’d sent. I assumed everyone checked their email 100 times a day to make sure they hadn’t missed anything and could respond immediately.
I checked all my work (over and over and over) to ensure perfection (and avoid failure).
This went unnoticed for a long time both because I thought it was ordinary and because on my worst day I work about two to three times as fast as my colleagues, so the extra time spent on these things didn’t have a measurable impact on my performance—except in stress, which finally built until I nearly imploded. I couldn’t check enough. Somehow I kept running out of time to perfect the 1,530th run-through that would make me feel my work was acceptable.
My husband and my therapist said the same thing:
You’re going to need to teach yourself that it’s okay to be imperfect and to make a mistake or to miss something. You’re going to have to practice giving yourself grace.
*****
After an entire chapter on the glorious grace of God that has resulted in the salvation of all who believe, Paul pauses at what we know as the beginning of Chapter 6 to make a brief disclaimer:
What shall we say to all this? Should we continue in sin and practice sin as a habit so that God’s gift of grace may increase and overflow? Certainly not! [AMP]
This is always, always, always the fear: that grace will be a slippery slope.
This was an implicit and perpetual assumption in the church environment within which I was raised: that we could misuse grace, could extend it too generously. That granting it to ourselves or to others could function as a sort of permission to sin or to avoid holiness.
Consequently, it was rarely extended at all. Forgiveness was given for public sins, but only after a substantial amount of public shaming and castigating that ensured the offense would absolutely never happen again. Minute infractions, or perceived infractions, held reverberating import (I will never forget the absolute emotional chaos I went through after ordering a virgin daiquiri on a high school cruise). To express love for a sinner or for someone in public sin always had to be mitigated: I love you, but I hate your sin. Just so you know.
(Believe me. They knew).
It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse behind this approach. I’ve seen what Bonhoffer called “cheap grace”: a careless grace that means nothing, merits nothing, requires nothing, costs nothing. We mustn’t reduce the grace of God through the sacrifice of Christ to a free and easy “we’re all good, don’t worry about it” philosophy that demands nothing of us. I know this is what my old church, and many churches, and many Christians, are trying to avoid.
But in all things, balance. It is only in my forties, having spent a life saturated in the measured approach of “yes God is graceful but” that I am beginning to encounter the wild, freeing, endless fount of grace I’ve actually read about in Scripture all these years. Having spent much time in an environment where giving yourself grace was seen as a slippery slope, to be taught to accept God’s grace and to welcome it, to practice it, is revolutionizing me.
“Are you living,” someone asked me recently, “like you believe God loves you?”
Too often, I live like I’m afraid to lose His love. Too often, I live like I am afraid that relying on God’s grace for me would be a slippery slope. Too often, I forget that really experiencing God’s grace makes me hungrier. More joyful. Desperate to be holier not from fear but from sheer affection and desire.
What does it mean, to live like that?
For me, it means that I don’t want cheap grace but I also don’t want scarce grace. I want to experience myself what I allow others, what God allows us: the shocked surprise of the prodigal wrapped up in a hug, Zacchaeus scraping his fine clothes on twigs scrambling down from the tree, Peter looking into the eyes of love over a crackling fire and charcoal-seared fish. I acknowledge the beginning of Romans 6 but I must also accept with it the entirety of Romans 5 prior.
For me, grace demands more not because I’m trying to game the system but because my gratitude compels me to ask in response. That is how I want to respond to grace; that is how I want to give grace; that is how I want to live. As though I’m loved.
Because I am.
Samaritan's Song 