What does it look like to give yourself grace?
That’s a good question and I’m still figuring it out. Giving myself grace is something I struggle with.
It’s because one of my bad habits is to work my butt off pretending to be perfect. To appear that I have my life, feelings and thoughts put together. I work hard to hide the messy me. And when the messy me shows up and when I make mistakes or fail, I beat myself up for messing up. I tend to be too hard on myself. Maybe this shows up more when I’m in a leadership position, I don’t know. And I’m not talking about this with this team I’m with specifically, but in general. As a leader, I naturally gear toward the belief that mistakes aren’t allowed because I should know better. For instances- I make a personal goal and fail to make that goal. Or I didn’t do my quiet time today, I know better than to not spend time with God every day. Or I told the team we’d do something, but it doesn’t work out. Or we end up going an hour out of the way on our way to debrief, because I wasn’t aware of some details about where we were going. And my natural tendency is to blame myself and tell myself I need to do better and work harder because I should have known those details. When in reality, it was just some miscommunication between several people, including myself.
When I fail, I get worried about what God thinks of me and also what people will think of me too. Is everyone mad or disappointed in me? What if my mistakes ruin relationships? What if I messed up/missed out on what God had for me in that moment? Living like this is exhausting and not healthy.
I can’t live in the fear of what if. I’m only human and mistakes are going to happen. But I have a choice in how I response in those moments. I can either beat myself up and worry about it or I can choose to learn from those moments, ask for forgiveness and give myself grace.
I heard someone say at debrief last week that there is no wasted space with God. It’s true. There isn’t anything that is unexpected to God. It’s comforting to know that my mistakes and moments of failures are not wasted and don’t in any way come as a surprise to God. I’m also thankful that God is a God of grace. I need only to look to Christ to know what grace looks likes.
God is always showing/teaching us something every day and sometimes those lessons come through those messy fail moments. And I think that’s what makes it so beautiful too. God can take anything and turn it into a beautiful revelation of who He is and who He sees you as. When you see yourself at your worse, God sees you as a child whom He loves, He sees you as His beautiful creation. Nothing you do will ever change the way God thinks of you. He loves you just as you are right now.
I’m not perfect, and I don’t have to pretend to be. I can be my messy self and know that God loves me in my messiness.
