My Therapist Wants To Know How I Feel About Grace
a theological relearning
Welcome Back, Wildroot Parables Readers!
(And a blessed Ash Wednesday to all!)
After a hiatus that essentially started at the beginning of the year (but officially ran from mid-January to the end of February) I have returned to this newsletter with a tentative personal offering of some recent thoughts.
As I re-enter this space and ease into my spiritual writings again, I’m so grateful that you stuck around with such patience through my wordless season.
I hope the following thoughts bless, inspire, or at least make you feel less alone.
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And now, on to the essay…
I woke up that morning extremely grumpy.
So grumpy, in fact, that I googled, “too grumpy to go to therapy” to see if I was the only person with this problem (unsurprisingly, I’m not).
But therapy is still a relatively new thing for me, so canceling makes me feel guilty. And this appointment was already postponed thanks to a freak multi-day, region-wide power outage earlier in the week, so…it was now or never.
I went, but I didn’t want to talk about why I was so grumpy; I wasn’t even sure I knew how to explain it. Instead, after the usual pleasantries, I found myself talking about gardening. How I just couldn’t drum up enthusiasm to get started and was feeling disappointed in myself about it.
My therapist pointed out that I’ve mentioned gardening before in previous sessions, as a hobby I enjoy. Why the hesitation to get started?
I hemmed and hawed about how much work I knew it was going to be. How messy the greenhouse is and what a state the garden beds are in. The amount of planning involved, especially now that a large portion of our lawn has been tilled for garden use. How busy I am, and how much time it takes.
“Sure,” Therapist rejoins, “but isn’t that part of the fun of a hobby? The work involved?”
So I dodge and reframe. Yeah, but once I plant the seeds the pressure is on to see each baby plant through to harvest, and I haven’t always been very good at that. I’ve let seedlings wither in their plug pots. I’ve let summer-thirsty plants die in drought. I’ve let harvested food go to waste. Last year the only plant that thrived was garlic, and I didn’t even do anything to make that happen. I let our whole crop of apples rot because I was too overwhelmed to can or preserve them.
All of that feels like failure to me. I hate it.
Therapist considers. “Okay. But again…what’s wasted is mostly the time and effort. It’s not like you’re spending thousands of dollars on seeds and soil, right? You’re not going into debt or anything. It’s not a failure if it’s something you enjoy doing, even if it doesn’t always go the way you hope it will. Why the pressure?”
I feel backed into a bit of a corner, because on a rational level she’s right, but I still feel like I’m pushing against this emotional wall, this tension that I can’t name.
That’s when—surprising both of us—I start to cry, throat closing up with emotion. I say the words out loud before I even feel them at gut-level.
“I guess I just feel like…I’ve been planting stuff for five years in this same garden and I’m getting worse at it, not better. I just want to see obvious signs that I’m improving. It’s so disappointing when I don’t see that. It makes me want to quit.”
We sit in this for a little bit while I sniffle into a tissue. I’m still kind of shocked at how visceral my reaction is to my own words, my own thoughts—it’s just a garden, for pete’s sake—but she’s thinking it through and letting the quiet settle.
Finally she asks, “How do you feel about grace?”
It’s a little bit of a cheeky question, and there’s compassionate mischief in her eye as she asks. We’re both Christians—I picked her from all the local therapists available because I wanted to know that she would understand where I’m coming from spiritually—so it’s largely rhetorical. We both know that how I feel about grace shouldn’t matter if I believe what I say I believe.
Grace is grace. Right?
The question hits me hard, though, because I’ve built a habit over time of thinking that I’m a little too gracious with myself. That I’m a little too quick to dismiss my faults or give myself a pass, excuse my messes and my perceived lack of discipline.
But clearly the opposite is true. I just sat across from a relative stranger and cried about planting seeds, because I’ve built myself an impossible-to-control standard where the goalposts always change. I’ve given myself a dozen ways to fail and only one way to succeed.
Somewhere along the line I decided that this thing I enjoy isn’t worth doing if I don’t measure up. How sad! How limiting!
Her question lingered long after the session was over. It made me ask myself where I’ve let my theology of grace go wrong after a lifetime of good Christian teaching.
Planting a garden is not about certainty, and so much of it is not about skill. Sure, over time you build instincts regarding local weather and ideal timing, soil health and plant health. But some seasons work out, and some don’t. Some plants work out, and some don’t. Sometimes the deer decide to make a buffet of your salad greens or the summer sun sends your root veggies bolting. Sometimes you get a bumper crop of tomatoes or zucchini or cukes, other years you can’t even convince a single plant to fruit.
Grace is understanding that neither the “good luck” or the “bad luck” in this life are earned. Grace is acknowledging that all things—glut and drought alike—come from the hand of God, and blessing is often hidden in both in surprising ways.
You can never do enough or be enough to buy providence. It is given.
And so, a few days after crying to my therapist about my garden, I planted my peas.
I ignored the wheedling little voice in my head—You’re starting them too late. The seed packet is old. What if you start them and don’t plant them out on time? What if you let this crop fail like you did last year?—and I put those chunky little seeds in the earth, and I inhaled the scent of soil and drizzly rain and early spring while I did so, because that’s the part I love. I love gardening because it feels good, regardless of the outcome.
Relearning a theology of grace that does not require my own skills, success, or measure of improvement is going to take time.
But hey…I’ve got time. In fact, I’ve got a whole growing season’s worth of time, and space enough to plant the seeds.
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What an amazing (grace!) question! I hadn't been able to articulate the path the Lord wants me to take during this season of Lent, but I think it's very much along these lines. I think it's easier for me to think about and talk about grace, than it is to live in it.
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing with us.
Hard relate to the lack of grace for myself (with a bit of a trickle down for others) and to the lack of noticing that lack of grace without some outside witnessing. Last year, I made mercy my word of the year, with an emphasis on myself. I'm not sure how far I got, but at least I was able to acknowledge when the rest of your life is hard, your workouts should be easy. It's progress.