Grace has a powerful but often misunderstood role. It is like a powerful anasthetic that neutralizes negative feelings and severs the connection between the reality of our perceived identity and the reality of our perceived life outcomes. It gives us a free pass, essentially. This makes it both terribly dangerous, when used incorrectly, and a powerful tool.
Anesthesia, applied without cause, granted to ourselves, cuts us off from the important information that our pain is attempting to convey to us. We might lose a limb, bleed to death, break our fingers, and never know what we had done. If we took pain away from others, they would never know what we had done to them. So it is a terribly dangerous and harmful thing to grant either ourselves or others grace without purpose, merely for the sake of relieving awareness of pain. This only alienates us from our own reality, our own disease, and harms us in the end. The power of grace is in its proper use.
Grace, like good anesthetic, is most useful for major surgery. It can give us distance and calmness to confront and remove our injuries and disease. It takes the burden of the pain off us while we focus on excising the cause. Grace, like anasthetic, is not for the healthy, or those believe themselves to be healthy, it is for those who have felt their sickness and pain and wish to be cured of it. Not by removing the symptoms or our awareness, but by removing the cause. Grace that protects us from our own infections is worse than pain. There is one other circumstance where the anasthetic of grace is useful, and that is among those with a pain disorder. Those whose perception of pain and concern is set far to high, who feel every movement as a painful barb and cannot use it productively to learn to discriminate better or worse actions and outcomes. For them, all actions are painful, all are worse. For these people, a daily dose of grace, enough to calm their reactions to a more accurate and helpful and productive level, is necessary.
Grace that protects us from our own infections is worse than pain. There is one other circumstance where the anasthetic of grace is useful, and that is among those with a pain disorder. Those whose perception of pain and concern is set far to high, who feel every movement as a painful barb and cannot use it productively to learn to discriminate better or worse actions and outcomes. For them, all actions are painful, all are worse. For these people, a daily dose of grace, enough to calm their reactions to a more accurate and helpful and productive level, is necessary.
Grace that protects us from our own infections is worse than pain. There is one other circumstance where the anasthetic of grace is useful, and that is among those with a pain disorder. Those whose perception of pain and concern is set far to high, who feel every movement as a painful barb and cannot use it productively to learn to discriminate better or worse actions and outcomes. For them, all actions are painful, all are worse. For these people, a daily dose of grace, enough to calm their reactions to a more accurate and helpful and productive level, is necessary.
There is one other circumstance where the anesthetic of grace is useful, and that is among those with a pain disorder. Those whose perception of pain and concern is set far to high, who feel every movement as a painful barb and cannot use it productively to learn to discriminate better or worse actions and outcomes. For them, all actions are painful, all are worse. For these people, a daily dose of grace, enough to calm their reactions to a more accurate and helpful and productive level, is necessary.
That is why only a physician, only God, can grant us grace. If we grant ourselves grace, our temptation will be to simply protect ourselves from facing our own pain or the pain of others. We will become numb and insulated from our own infirmity. God grants us grace because he is a surgeon seeking to make a transplant. He gives us awareness of our own ultimate infirmity along with the distance and security to be able to confront it and tear it out without crippling pain. It is a curious fact of psychological research that there is nothing with the sheer potential of total personality transformation as religious conversion. A total reorganization of our value system for ourselves, our actions, and the world. This most painful and fundamental restructuring often burns our existing idea of ourselves and the value of our actions to the ground. Such a change is often terrible to endure, and is only compelling because of the hope of the new self that awaits on the other side. Grace is the balm that makes such terrible transformations bearable.
It is a curious fact of psychological research that there is nothing with the sheer potential of total personality transformation as religious conversion. A total reorganization of our value system for ourselves, our actions, and the world. This most painful and fundamental restructuring often burns our existing idea of ourselves and the value of our actions to the ground. Such a change is often terrible to endure, and is only compelling because of the hope of the new self that awaits on the other side. Grace is the balm that makes such terrible transformations bearable.
Those who have accepted God’s grace no longer live under judgment. Not their own, nor that of others. They answer to their judge and physician. He is all the judgment we need, and he is all the grace we need.
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 