A more excellent way

I was sitting with a friend, lamenting the way the formula I’d believed in hadn’t worked out, wishing for another formula, even as I acknowledged that the problem is, there is no magic formula.

Somehow, I always thought it would all work out. All those moms who poured their lives into their kids would be rewarded with kids who followed the Lord. All of us who “kissed dating good bye” would end up falling in love and getting married without any unnecessary broken hearts.

And then, the train wreck. Friends who I grew up with pregnant and unmarried, young adults leaving the faith, my own failed relationship and subsequent heartbreak.

I kept thinking, “what went wrong?”. Part of me recognized the problem was that all along, without realizing it, I believed some form of the prosperity gospel. I would have spoken out against the belief that following God would bring me health or money or success. But, I believed that following God would guarantee healthy happy relationships. Even as I began to realize the false beliefs that had crept in, I still kept thinking, “but maybe we did just mess up”. Maybe the problem was we didn’t try hard enough. We weren’t quite set apart enough. Maybe if we had been a family with 8 children all in matching dresses who ground our own wheat and didn’t watch movies it would have been different. Maybe if I had gotten my parents’ permission before starting a relationship, instead of their blessing after starting it, I wouldn’t have ended up with a broken heart. Maybe if those other families hadn’t sent their kids back to public school, they wouldn’t have become single moms.

And maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. Because there are no fail proof formulas. My mom recently sent me a link to a website called “Recovering Grace”. The people sharing their stories there were from those “perfect” families, the ones who did it all right, who followed all the rules. And guess what? They had heartbreaks too. Not everything worked out. And along the way, some of them lost sight of their relationship with our loving father and focused on following all the right steps so things would work out right.

It’s hard though. I want to know “the” right way to do things. I like to know the answers. But, Jesus doesn’t do formulas. Just look at the stories of him healing the blind- he puts mud on one man’s eyes, another he touches, and a third he just speaks to and he’s healed. So, maybe for some, courtship is the way to meet their spouse, but for others, God uses e-harmony to bring them together. Homeschooling is what God calls some to, but others send their kids to public school, or Christian school, and none of those decisions make someone part of some Christian elite, the group that is following God more faithfully or closely.

So now, I’m trying to live a formula-less life. A grace filled life. A life that looks to Jesus and knows that HE is my inheritance, despite the mess that goes on around me. And I fail. I catch myself thinking for the four hundred seventy third time, “now I know the answer”, focusing on getting it right instead of focusing on the one who saved me from needing to work to please God. But that’s all right. Because that’s what grace is for- starting over again, forgiveness, relationship. And so Jesus calls me back to himself, and once again, I stumble along, learning to live in grace, by grace.