09/22/2026
For a long time I believed I had to earn my worth. Climb higher, push harder, and maybe then I would finally be enough.
It is an exhausting way to live. There is always another summit, another test, another way you have fallen short. You never quite arrive.
The thing that finally set me free was grace.
Grace is the wild, almost unbelievable idea at the very heart of the Christian faith. That we are already loved, fully and completely, not for what we have achieved, but in spite of every way we fall short. That Jesus meets us exactly as we are, mess and all, and calls us friend anyway.
I did not have to become impressive for God to love me. I did not have to summit anything. I simply had to stop striving long enough to accept a gift I could never have earned in a thousand lifetimes.
And that truth changed how I see everyone else too. If I am loved like that, undeserving and all, then so is the person in front of me. It makes you gentler, slower to judge, quicker to forgive.
We are so hard on ourselves, and so hard on each other. Grace is the medicine for both.
Where in your life have you been striving to earn something that has been freely yours all along?
