Confronting Grace

When my high school religion teacher used the word "grace" in class one day, I had no idea what it meant. She knew that I was a Christian and she assumed that I would know what that word meant. I nodded in agreement with her comment, but I wasn't familiar with that term. I was 17 and attended church every week and was the Hermione whose hand always shot up in Primary, Young Women, and Sunday School lessons. I knew all of the answers and had read The Book of Mormon several times, but I didn't know about grace as a central Christian concept, as a doctrine. It was more than a decade later before I first experienced grace. My girls were both young and I felt overwhelmed by the task of caring for them. It was exhausting and lonely work. I took care of them all day and then sometimes had to care for them in the night. I taught a class and I attended church and that was it, my whole life: childcare, class, church, sleep. It felt like my girls and I would be stuck in an endless cycle of unsuccessful potty training, food being thrown on the floor at mealtimes, and tantrums. I loved my children but I didn't believe that they would ever be old enough for kindergarten. I was convinced that day would never come. One winter afternoon I was reading my scriptures and when I was done, I prayed that God would let me know what I needed to fix. In my prayer, I promised that I would work on it, whatever it was, I just needed to know. I felt broken and worn out and I could only see that I had tried to meet some ideal of what womanhood and motherhood should look like, but I had failed miserably. There was a long list of church expectations and I had tried to meet them, but there was never enough time and it is difficult to get anything done with a 2 and a 3 year old in tow. All of my sincere effort felt like failure. Life had left me behind and I felt that God was disappointed with my lack of achievement. I don't often receive immediate answers to my prayers, but I did on this day. As soon as I ended my prayer, I heard a voice in my mind say, "I love you as you are." At that same moment, I felt a consuming warmth that comforted me and affirmed me in a way that I had not felt before. God held me in that moment. It has taken me years to understand this answer. I knew that God loved me, but I also felt that God would love me more if I was a perfect person, a perfect Mormon. I knew that perfection was technically impossible, but perhaps I just wasn't trying hard enough and perhaps no one had ever achieved perfection because they hadn't tried hard enough. I felt that my environment and community reinforced this need for conformity and perfection. This simple answer of "I love you as you are," and the accompanying feelings of being loved and valued, began to change me and my faith. This was my first experience confronting grace, which ran so counter to the idea of God that I had previously held. I had wondered how I could be enough for God to accept me only to hear God telling me that I was enough. It was a new beginning.