Sacred vs. Profane Perspectives on Grace

We’ve been talking about grace and obedience, and how good we have to be to be saved. We’re trying to draw some of these concepts together. We’ve learned that obedience, which is another way of saying doing things God’s way, is, in general, a better way to live. It brings honor to God, but it doesn’t eliminate the storms of life and is not, it turns out, the condition of our salvation. 

As difficult as it is to understand the role of obedience in the Christian life, the concept of grace is no easier. Even though grace is offered for free, we want to pay for it. The idea that something as valuable as eternal life can be had for nothing at all seems too good to be true and even utterly scandalous. Above all, it just doesn’t seem fair. It just feels not right to not get what you deserve or to get what you don’t deserve. 

Grace is ubiquitous, relentless, and everlasting. It surrounds us, it envelops us. There’s plenty for all and it’s free. So why won’t everyone be saved? Is it easier to be saved or is it easier to be lost? Is it possible to turn grace aside to shun the grace? Is it possible to lose grace? Or as the scripture puts it, how can we fall from grace?  Paul writes: 

 It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. 

 Look! I, Paul, tell you that if you have yourselves circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who has himself circumcised, that he is obligated to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by the Law; you have fallen from grace. (Galatians 5:1-4) 

Notice here the condition of having fallen from grace. Those who fall from grace are seeking to be justified by the law, Paul says. There are apparently two poles for judgment—the two trees that we talked about last week—the tree of works and the tree of grace. They are two poles for judgment, which is another way of saying that we face judgment in two different ways. 

Either we place into judgment our own works, our own effort, our own prayers, our own piety, our own obedience, our own devotion, or like the publican in the parable we say “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” We simply place ourselves in God’s hands and rely on His mercy. “God be merciful to me, a sinner. I accept your grace.” 

The fall from grace then is to turn aside from grace and to rely on our own justification by the law. Putting works into judgment is seen repeatedly in the teachings of Jesus, in the stories of the prodigal son (the elder son desired to put his works into judgment), the all-day-long workers at the vineyard, Jonah and his prayer (Jonah 4), Abraham at the binding of Isaac at the altar of sacrifice (giving his all but not enough), Cain and Abel, and others. Grace will hound you, it seems, unless you insist on putting your own works into judgment. 

Not everyone will be saved, although it could be argued that everyone could be saved. God devised a plan that invites everyone to be saved; but apparently, some turn aside the initiative of grace. You might say that turning aside grace is the same as committing the unpardonable sin. We see this turning aside of grace in the story of the man at the wedding feast that Jesus told as a parable:

 And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.”’ But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. 

 “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:1-14): 

In the same parable as told in Luke 14 we see the king sending out the invitation three times. After the first invitation was refused, he sends it again. And when the second invitation fails to fill up the hall, he sends a third invitation. Here we see a parable on the fall of grace. Here we see the answer to the question: If grace is so abundant, how can we lose out on it? Here we see the invitation is really the call to grace, the original the second and the third invitations are all calls to grace. 

Here we see in this parable two ways to fall from grace. The original group was busy in their own work. An invitation from the king to the wedding of his son is no small matter. Such invitations do not come every day. It is not a trivial invitation. To put one’s own effort ahead of the king’s grace is to turn grace aside. The demonstration of grace is so off-putting that it provokes anger—in this case, leading eventually to murder. 

The invitation is broad and comprehensive. It is extended to the good and to the bad. But although the invitation is universal, it is also very personal. One man alone, apparently, did not have on a wedding robe. Everyone else who came—good or bad—had a robe for themselves. It was their individual robe. It was a personal robe. It was a robe uniquely from for them, just the right size. So although grace is widespread, it is also singular. Although it is ubiquitous, it is yet very exclusive. We have a picture of this in the passage at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: 

 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7:13-14) 

This is the concept of the narrow gate. Although we have always seen the narrow gate and the broad way as symbols of how easy it is to be lost in the broad way and how difficult it is to be saved in the narrow way, we need to re-understand the story of the narrow gate. We cannot see the narrow way as a way of limitation; we must see the narrow way as the way of grace, as the route for salvation. 

Few find it, because you cannot find it by yourself. You must be led to the way of grace. It must be there by invitation. In other words, we don’t find grace: Grace finds us. It is, after all, the way of grace that leads to life. It is narrow because it is personal. The way of grace is individual, everyone gets what they need personally, one by one through the narrow gate. They get the right kind of grace, the right amount of grace, the right size of grace. 

At the wedding feast everyone is personally outfitted, appropriate for themselves, except for one man. The narrow gate cannot simply be a limit to passage because Revelation talks about a multitude who can only have come through the narrow gate: 

 “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,…” (Revelation 7:9): 

A great multitude which could not even be counted. Therefore, they have all come—this entire multitude—through the narrow gate. Here at the wedding feast, everyone is rounded up. Grace is not limited, it is abundant for all—for the good and for the bad. The narrow gate is Jesus Christ Himself. 

There are then two ways to shun grace. First, you can refuse the invitation: “I’m too busy with my own work.” Secondly, you can avoid the narrow gate, where the robes are dispensed individually for size and shape. Somehow you got into the wedding feast by some route other than the narrow gate. John 10 says that the shepherd goes in through the narrow gate Jesus himself is the gate of the sheepfold. Robbers and thieves, Jesus says in John 10, go over the wall. To resist grace is to refuse the invitation. 

In the end, we see that the grace party is on the inside. It is on the inside of Nineveh. The grace party is on the inside of the father’s house with the prodigal son. It’s on the inside of the wedding feast. Those fallen from grace are on the outside. At the end of this wedding, two groups are on the outside: Those who refused the invitation, and the man who willfully ignored the narrow gate where the wedding garments were given.

To experience grace is to be on the inside of the house of grace. The prodigal father pleads with his elder son to come inside the house. But in the end, it is his choice to remain outside, putting his own effort, his own prayer, his own piety, his own work and judgment in place of God’s grace. It is a great irony that when we see obedience as doing things God’s way, grace then comes clearly into focus. Doing things God’s way is the way of grace. It is not the way of the law. It is the way of grace.

Paul wrote about the way of grace as an adoption, as an inheritance, as a way of putting yourselves inside the house of grace. Paul, told the Ephesians:

 To the saints who are at Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He favored us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:1-6) 

We can be adopted into the inside of the house, but likewise we can also be born into the house. We can be born again, as Jesus talked about with Nicodemus in John 3. We can be adopted or we can be born. It seems as we as if we were chosen before the foundation of the world to be a holy and blameless people. But that plan went awry. It didn’t work out, when we ate from the wrong tree in the garden. 

We needed a new plan, the plan of grace and adoption; the original plan for us was to be holy and blameless, but the backup plan was to be adopted by grace. Both lead to belonging in the father’s house, but in only, in our case, by grace. We cannot establish residency in God’s house by our own work. Only the father’s invitation and the father’s initiative gets us into the house. 

So what is your risk of falling from grace? Is it easy or is it hard to fall from grace? Why is putting my work into judgment such a temptation for me? Why do we see over and over in the stories and the parables and the teaching of Jesus, the inclination to put our works into judgment? If grace is so easy, then why is it so hard? What does the story of the wedding feast teach us about grace and about falling from grace? If doing things God’s way is the way of grace, why are we so inclined to rely upon our own obedience? And what does it mean to live a life of grace? How do you live a life of grace? How do I live a life of grace? And how do each of us avoid falling from grace? Is falling from grace the same thing as the unpardonable sin? Is it deliberate? Can it occur by accident? Is the unpardonable sin simply putting my works into judgment rather than relying on God’s grace, thereby turning aside God’s grace? 

What are your thoughts about the loss of grace, about falling from grace, and about how difficult it is to remain within God’s house within God’s grace? And why does Grace elicits such strong emotions? Jonah would rather die than see God’s grace and action. God says to him, “Jonah, are you kidding me? You’d rather be dead than to see my grace in action?!” Jonah then goes into a long soliloquy about how God was a merciful God, as if somehow this condemns God. 

In the parable of the wedding feast, we see that the ultimate response to this repeated invitation of grace is eventually the murder of the messenger of grace. Jesus himself dies as a messenger of grace, as a forgiver of sins, as a purveyor of grace. Even the disciples, Peter and Paul, engage in a very public confrontation about grace (Galatians 2). Why is grace so difficult? And why does it elicit such strong emotions, even death and murder? Is it easier to be saved or is it easier to be lost? What are your thoughts about falling from grace, and what questions do you have concerning the topic of grace that we may need to cover before we move on?

Donald: If it’s my way or God’s way, it means that they’re not the same. “My way” sounds selfish, and “God’s way” is love, really. But if it’s my way or God’s way, does that lead to the idea of works? Because it can’t be my way, so I need to work into God’s way, I need to figure out what God’s way is and then act upon it.

C-J: For those who believe in something greater than ourselves, as we invest in that relationship with the divine, the creator, I think there’s less of “I, me and mine.” It’s not submission, it’s seeing the wisdom in this relationship, because left to my own devices, I don’t do very well. It’s really easy for me to justify my attitude towards somebody who’s done an injustice perceived or real to me, or things I care about. So I think grace isn’t anything I can do for myself. Grace is something that is a continuum. 

An incident happened to me this week in a relationship that really disappointed me and I was angry about it. I heard myself say something out loud and I said, “Lord, forgive me, let your grace abound.” Without that relationship with God, that reaction to what I perceived as just wrong, because this person doesn’t have that relationship. I cannot have an expectation from her different from what she was able to give me or to put forth. 

It is nothing we do. I don’t deserve it, I cannot earn it. I hate to think about predestination, because that’s like, “I created you to have this relationship and these other people don’t.” And I believe that’s the Holy Spirit. Even that: Did I choose the Holy Spirit, or did the Holy Spirit quicken within me? My relationship with God is challenging, sweet, rewarding. I can’t imagine life without it. And it’s only by grace that is unearned.

Michael: I think I can draw parallels between some of the stories of grace and some of the ways that you’re lost and found—for example, the coin, the sheep, and the prodigal son. For example the question concerning the guy at the Gate Beautiful was “Who sinned? Why is this guy broken from the beginning of his life?” The answer as I see it is that he was lost but didn’t know it. It’s the original sin, if you like. But he was saved by grace. 

The same as maybe with the woman caught in adultery. It’s the society that was giving her the guilt and crushing her. It’s similar maybe to the sheep, which has some knowledge and awareness but it’s not its fault for getting lost. It’s society that is crushing her. She was given grace. 

But then you have people like Paul / Saul who willingly know everything but decide to do it their way, to take things in their own hands. He was still offered grace. I think it comes in all shapes and forms and it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not. It still comes.

Don: Does that make you angry?

Michael: No, no; it makes me happy. 

Carolyn: We have a Great Commission. God has sent us out to tell others the Gospel. Is grace involved in that? We tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion, being born again, raised from the dead to give us salvation. But does grace come in to the Great Commission? Is it something that should overlay it? Should we convey that we are so excited at having the chance to live by grace? It’s a new feeling in my life. I love it. But I also have a reservation: I don’t think I’m feeling the true joy. I want to know the true joy of grace. I’d like to know if others have the same kind of feeling.

Reinhard: To me, the question is about losing or gaining grace. For Christians, to lose grace would be a great pity, because we are aware of what it means, and we desire it. When we have it, we have a God-given opportunity to love to every human being. Grace is very abundant, just like air, but we have to be active in pursuing grace. We can’t just stand still doing nothing. 

To be obedient means there is something we have to follow. In this case, it is the moral law of God. The law given by God, by Jesus, cannot be higher than the law giver. The law giver is Jesus. So when we accept him as the law giver and express our love to others, as Jesus wants, then we are in line with his commandments. I think it’s very hard for us to lose our connection with him if we stay on the same page with him. 

No matter which covenant God gave us in the Old Testament and the New Testament, when we have the spirit of the law of God written in our minds and in our hearts, then we tend to do the right thing. Of course, obviously, we sometimes fall, but we get up and try again. Discussing and  learning about the love of God, as we do in this class, contributes to spiritual growth and enables us better to live the good Christian life through the grace available to us. 

Perhaps some people may never know the Gospel, but in the end, the multitude of people will be saved, the Bible says, on resurrection day. In the meantime, by continuing to learn and grow spiritually, it’s hard for us to lose grace. We only can gain more.

Don: What about the bad people who have been extended grace on resurrection day? Does that make us angry?

Reinhard: That is a matter for God’s judgment. I think we have to look to our own salvation, and leave the rest up to God.

C-J: Before there was a written law, it was an oral tradition that benefitted the community. Everybody knew the rules of the road. But grace is not about rules of the road. If we are ambassadors in this quest for the Great Commission, our ambassadorship is displayed not by thumping a book with a bunch of rules in it but by the way we live our life and the words that we use to bring life, so that they would come to us and say, “Tell me more about this thing that you seem to have about you. I don’t understand what I’m looking at.” 

I think grace isn’t just for some. Grace is always available. We know intuitively where there is life, where there is abundance, This just can’t be right, this chaos. I don’t want to be in this place, in my head or in my physical environment. I just know there’s got to be something better than this. I think that’s going back to the garden spiritually as metaphor. I just cannot believe the Creator who can create this beautiful planet would also have this chaos as part of the equation. 

We are ambassadors through the choices we make, even if they don’t know what they’re looking at. We’re ambassadors with the word of life, empowered by the Holy Spirit for forgiveness and love and grace. And that, I think is the beauty. Unmerited favor was given to me. Let me give it to you. Even if I’m fussing with it, I will extend it.

Michael: I understand that putting your own works in front of grace is why you don’t get into the kingdom, because you essentially refuse it. But what about the interloper who sneaked in to the wedding feast? Why did he not go through the gate? Why did he not take up the robe? How is his behavior different from putting your works before grace, refusing it from the get go? 

C-J: Because desperate people do desperate things. Did he want to wait in line? Oh, no. “What if they close the gate? It’s dangerous out here!”

Michael: I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m trying to understand it literally.

C-J: I think when life gets to the point that we are desperate—we’re sick, we’re hungry, we’re in a war zone, our babies are dying before our eyes, slowly, sickly—and powerless, we come to a place of “I can’t live without my baby. I can’t believe the world is this cruel.” We fall to our knees and we say, “This is such a brief moment. She’ll never grow up.” 

How can this be right? How can this be fair? Why do we do this to one another? We stand before something we do not understand and hope that indeed it exists, and humble ourselves and say, even if we don’t use the word grace, “Help me to understand.” We can’t begin to understand what it would take so that they can have peace. Only God can give us that level of peace. 

Don: How do you share grace with others? Is that something that you find easy and readily accepted?

C-J: I think about these families who have just lost their children in Texas which, historically, has been populated by a very religious group of individuals who make their decisions based on what they see as the rule of God. But when we don’t have answers, we often start pointing fingers. “The police could have and should have done this, why wasn’t this available?” 

But in the end, that day is over, and they have to go home with unanswered questions and burdens. “Who are they going to look to next God? How could you allow this? What is the meaning and purpose in this event? I’ll never be able to have another child. I’ll never replace that little person. I’ll always wonder who he or she could have been as an adult.” It is only God’s grace, that we believe that that individual was something that will love her when I’m in her absence. “Where’s my mommy and daddy? Where’s my community?” We have to believe that the children who are innocent are protected on the other side. 

And yet we still live in that community as human beings in this time and place. We have to be able to forgive and understand and say “How can we fix this?” Is it law? Is it about things? Is it about people? How do we come to a place of not anger or pain, but resolution with consciousness towards a future? That requires something that is a challenge, because it has to coalesce beyond my pain to the future, because this is only a brief time. 

What’s our legacy going to be for this country, for these families, for this town?  It’s going to be a long journey. If grace is in the room, good choices will be made that are not reactive, not oppressive. not punitive, but with wisdom, cautiously in prayer, communion, will they make better choices.

Donald: It seems that the words that surround grace like “abundant love, care, generosity, goodness” are in such contrast to what else is pointed out in terms of the narrow way. “Narrow way” does not sound graceful, it sounds like “You better work toward that in order to find it.” The narrow way may not be perceived the way I’m describing it, but it sounds like it’s all about works and all about trying to do it in a particular way. It doesn’t sound broad, it sounds narrow. They’re both ideas that are presented in the Bible and in my mind cause disturbance.

Michael: That’s where it gets hard. The narrow way in the Bible is, for me, the interpretation that I’ve heard all my life; namely, that you have to do a laundry list of things. That’s why it sounds like the way you’re describing it.

Donald: I remember in Sabbath School a drawing of the narrow way. It was a very narrow one-lane road along a mountain ledge leading toward heaven. It was terribly disturbing to me. I contrast it with open arms.

C-J: I think the narrow way is the commitment to the relationship. But grace: “I was blind, but now I see.” So I can see that path clearly. It is challenging but it is part of the relationship. Fidelity, truth, commitment are part of the relationship, and that is very narrow. That is very clear. But grace, “I was blind and now I see.” 

Michael: I think it’s easiest to share grace with people who have been shunned by the church. I think those are the people who would find it much easier to understand and accept grace. These people are a similar category to the people who Jesus found success with. That’s why he kept hanging out with them! They were labeled sinners by society, by the church.

Don: So maybe the answer to Carolyn’s question is we have to share with the sinners, the shunned. How about those who view themselves as being very upright church members? They don’t need grace?

C-J: Jesus addressed that. “You den of thieves. You liars. You cheaters.” It is harder to minister to those in the church than to those who are looking for a healthy relationship, even if it means letting go of the familiar or believing they’re good enough. But self-righteous people hang on tight. They don’t want to hear anything from you. They’re gonna be pointing out their beam in your eye. “You don’t want to go down that road, sister.”

Jay: We seem to have an adverse reaction to grace. We really want to fight against it and bring works into the equation. I wonder how grace is related to our conversations about the will of God? I think that one of the issues we have with grace is that it completely relinquishes our control of a situation. Human beings are not fond of not having control of a situation. 

To me, that seems to be related to conversations we’ve had about the will of God (what is the will of God, our will vs. the will of God, etc.). This is the rub. I’m wondering if that occurs in us because of this complete relinquishment of any control over how grace comes to us, what it does for us, and how it’s tied to salvation, if it is tied to salvation. 

Grace is completely out of our control, and having something completely out of our control is not something human beings can live with.  We put things into silos—the grace silo, the works silo, the forgiveness silo, the judgment silo, the will of God silo. Perhaps the reasons for the violent reaction to grace—to the idea that bad people get grace rests in this conflict between the will of God and the human need for control. 

Don: “If God would just listen to me a little bit more!” This is Jonah’s argument. “I knew, God, that this was what you were, and you wouldn’t listen to me. You would do your own thing, which is to be merciful and kind hearted, etc.” God is flabbergasted. “You gotta be kidding me, Jonah! Don’t you see that these people don’t even know what the left hand and the right hand is doing, and you want to just write them off?” The story is stark and it’s exactly as Jason says: Jonah was (we are) unwilling to relinquish control to God, to let God be God. We need to help God. God needs our help. 

David: I’ve argued before and I argue again that we still haven’t got a good definition of grace. I think what Jonah was mad about was God’s mercy. We lump mercy together with grace and love. I don’t think we should. I think they are separate words, separate silos, for a reason. 

I keep coming back to my premise that grace is what the Beatitudes are all about. Grace comes when you’re at the end of your tether. The Ninevites weren’t at the end of their tether, or at least, they didn’t know they were. But they were in a bad way and needed some correction, and God’s mercy allowed that. It wasn’t his grace. They didn’t have a huge spaceship above them about to blast them to smithereens. 

Grace comes to the mother of one of those slain children when she finally comes to terms with the loss of her child. A peace then envelops her, a “peace that passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:6).  That’s grace. 

We talk about the joy of grace, but there is no joy in that mother. There is peace that comes with the grace, but in no way can we call it a joy. There’s not even understanding. It’s pure acceptance. We cannot understand (as we’ve acknowledged over and over again) and the Bible tells us so. It’s just a matter of acceptance. It is a matter of belief, of believing that there is a higher power and that the terrible thing we don’t understand is out of our hands. That, to me, is grace. It is relief. It is peace. 

I’ve told my story of a dream where I felt I was being attacked by the devil and rescued by God. The feeling I had was hardly one of joy. It was it was one of unutterable relief. 

Donald: I think you’re using the word acceptance and belief as being slightly different. Are they different? I believe in something or I accept something. It’s easier for me to accept the concept of God’s grace than to believe in it, I guess.

David: To me, accepting the concept of God is belief in God.

Donald: If I accept something, does that change my behavior? If I believe something, should that change my behavior?

C-J: I believe if I’m in crisis and I call the police that they will come. But what happens if they don’t? Do I believe that police will never come to rescue me or protect me? Or maybe it was triaged, or they were short staffed. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist; it’s just that they were unable to meet my need at that time, the way I expected. 

That happens all the time, in every area of life. I go to a doctor if I’m sick. I expect that doctor to tell me what’s wrong and if there’s a remedy or what I need to do to get quality of life for whatever length of time I have. But if I don’t have a doctor near me, does that mean that the definition of a doctor no longer exists and my expectation was unreasonable? It depends on the lens you’re looking through. If it’s narrow, then your need wasn’t met. If it’s wide, then it still exists, because you understand the dynamics and the sphere of how that was defined to begin with. Was it applicable? Was it denial? Was it abuse, neglect? 

Our relationship with God and others is very complex. It’s time and place and awareness. When you’re in a state of extreme pain or confusion, it’s hard to sort through that, but it doesn’t change what is outside of you. We can only impact truly what’s happening inside ourselves. The individual has power, and when the individual realizes that he or she does have some control, that’s the only way out of trauma, or confusion. “What do I know? Where am I? Where am I going? What do I have? What do I need?” And then you can find your way out of the woods.

Donald: As Jason said, we all really want control, total control, and believing in something or accepting something is a lot easier to do when you’re not in control. When everything is good, I’m not really thinking about releasing my control. It’s when I’m down and out, at the end of my tether. Then, I’m not in control anyway, so just take it. There’s nothing to be taken. It’s gone.

C-J: I think control issues are much more difficult for men than women. I don’t mean that in terms of sexual bias. I just think it’s the way the brains are wired, and the chemistry within the species. Women are so attuned to change because of the menses and birthing and raising children. Everything’s constantly in a state of flux.  Men are accustomed to having control over their environment. Traditionally, hunters and gatherers, and warriors, they really did have control of their world. 

And it’s still in us, it’s what’s in many ways has helped the species to survive—to have that diversity of awareness and skill sets. Even the women that are in the military don’t have the upper body strength of men. They weren’t built for that. The wiring—meaning the brain, the way the chemistry works—men seem to struggle more with that challenge of who has control. Women sit back and they go, “What am I looking at? What’s really important here?” We don’t have to work at it.

Donald: I’m not really talking about gender, I’m talking about (for instance) when you receive some bad medical news. You’re out of control, male or female.

C-J: I think women handle that better, but not because of gender. In society, women are plugged in as caretakers and nurturers and they’re plugged in because they’re good at it. If I want a barn built, I don’t want a bunch of people like me—five foot and barely 100 pounds. I don’t want it to be about gender. 

This is the importance of how God works. We must coalesce together, our gifts and our talents. There is a time for leadership where control and understanding that responsibility is essential. And it’s done in different ways in households. A household is a microcosm. I believe in headship, and I believe in division of labor. We have to recognize that we must coalesce with God, we must coalesce with our partners, we must coalesce with our community. And we must understand that we must all be “we us our,” not “me, mine and I.” Once we get rid of the individual, it works much better. It isn’t about what I want. It’s what is best for the community.

Michael: Maybe it has been harder for us to accept grace from God because we refer to him as a male. Mother’s love is much more giving. It’s much more forgiving. It’s much more abundant. It’s less conditional and “What did I do?” and “How can I please the father?” I do think it’s wrong to represent God as a male and as a father. I think a more rounded representation that includes God as a mother, as a female, actually might help us with grace, and with accepting grace.

Don: It’s pretty interesting. I never thought of that. I like that very much.

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