Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
February is already a short month, and it’s been going quickly for us. Ed got sick (everybody’s been getting sick), and I’ve had extra stuff to do (mostly unrelated to Ed getting sick), including attending an emergency landing class for passengers of private planes. I learned how to use the radio and read most of the gauges in an airplane, and I flew and landed a “plane” in a fairly realistic simulator—all safely on the ground.
Honestly, this letter is out so late because I have been avoiding it, because it feels absurd for me to write about grace. Like a small child new to tooth-brushing, I feel I’ve barely learned about this, don’t understand it in depth, and am clumsy about executing it.
I chose this topic because the idea that God has grace for our mistakes—for my mistakes—keeps coming up, and I wanted to organize and record what I’ve learned so far. I hope it can somehow help someone else, too, even if only as a reminder of what you know already.
Mistakes, as a topic in general, have popped up at least a few times in my Substack letters (e.g., “The Creative Process and Fear of Failure”, January 2023; “Writing, Pottery, and the War of Art”, March 2024). They’re an unavoidable part of the creative process, and apparently an unavoidable part of existing while human. But I’m not graceful about making them.
My November 2024 letter (“An Art Story That Makes Me Want to Crawl into a Hole”) records a recent example of my plummeting into the pride pit after a perceived failure. My dad replied via email, “I’m afraid that personality trait of wrong-headed expectations of self-perfection was probably inherited from my side of the family…me, in particular. (Sorry!)”.
The phrase “wrong-headed expectations of self-perfection” is (ironically) the perfect description. I’ve discovered that I retain an irrational sense that I, Rae, am holding my little part of the world together, as if I should be able to run it all smoothly without failure or help. With such prideful expectations, I respond to my own mistakes by becoming a puddle of shame and despair. At its worst, that kind of response may devolve into deflection, cover-ups, or inappropriate blame.
Expecting perfection contributes to avoiding writing. My theoretical Substack letter, the one I imagine I will eventually write when I’ve slept enough and I have a few totally free days and the right caffeine balance in my body, is perfect; my actual letter isn’t.
Like my July 2024 letter (“How Do We Develop Wise Judgment?”), this is less about moral choices (though much of this still applies to those types of mistakes), and more about ordinary failures, like dropping a plate, forgetting an ingredient, or honestly misjudging how to talk to someone.
Bigger than that, I struggle with “owning” my power and agency as an individual. I find it hard to judge wisely whether I have the power, authority, or responsibility to act in a situation, and if acting is wise even if I can rightly do so by other criteria.
A few relatively small examples: Do I email someone to tell them that something is a problem? Do I call my senator about a bill that seems harmful to Hoosiers? Do I say yes to another creative project? Do I travel to visit people, or just stay home?
There isn’t always an obvious moral choice, and what counts as the “loving” or “right” thing to do can vary across situations.
What if I get it wrong?
If you read my letters regularly, you might notice that I keep coming back to ideas about power, freedom, and stewardship, and the wisdom it takes to handle those things. I dwell in these ideas not because I feel I understand them, but because I want to learn about them.
In my July 2024 letter, I wrote, “We have great power to develop in wise judgment, and we receive daily the grace of a God Who makes things work together for good even when we do get things wrong.”
I wrote those words with a vague awareness that they were true, as those of us with little science background still refer to “dopamine” as the reason we keep scrolling on our phones. I have reasons to believe it, but I don’t really get it.
About two months later, two of my friends, within a day of one another, said something along the lines of, “God has grace for your mistakes.” (Both conversations were related to the topic of knowing when to act and when to refrain.)
“Grace for mistakes” felt just as amorphous when they said it as when I wrote that line in July. I found it hard to imagine what that grace might look like.
I also didn’t know what it meant to “accept grace”, and while I’m still not sure I do, I think I have more of an idea. Hebrews 12:28 contains a word (χάρις, “charis”) that’s translated “grace” in the NKJV and “grateful” in the ESV:
“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.” (NKJV)
“Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,” (ESV)
I know to be grateful for grace, but these variant translations tied grace to gratitude for me in a new way. Accepting grace might simply mean being grateful for whatever I can, and thereby accepting the gifts I’ve already been given.
In the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, he wrote about what he called a “thorn […] in the flesh”, “a messenger of Satan to harass [him], to keep [him] from becoming conceited.” He prayed repeatedly that God would take it away, and God answered him:
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9 (ESV)
Instead of tightening my grasp on all my pride, I must drop it to accept His grace. Where I am weak, God is strong; I have no disadvantage when I am walking with Him.
What might grace look like, in concrete examples? I’ve made some observations.
Grace could mean the ability to gently pivot. I received sourdough starter from a friend early last year, and I’ve been learning how to bake delicious bread ever since. The timing of the rise is partially based on room temperature, partially how lively the starter is at the time the dough is mixed.
One day, I hadn’t pulled the right levers to make the bread rise within 24 hours, and I had a feeling that perhaps I should modify my goal instead of forcing it to rise with external heat. I found information for what to do with non-rising dough—make a focaccia—and we have a rosemary plant, and we happened to have a can of black olives on hand, so I could follow the seasoning instructions closely.
It was delicious. The instructions I’d found said focaccia is best consumed warm, on the day it’s made, so I brought it to dinner with our friends, and many people could enjoy it.
Did God care enough to direct my bread-baking in a more productive direction? The option to gently pivot instead of wasting dough, stubbornly trying to make it work, or—my typical response—just melting down, felt like grace to me.
Grace might mean the mistake isn’t a problem. My tangible lesson in this arrived shortly before our master bathroom was renovated in the fall. When the shipment of tile for the shower arrived in early September, I had a sense that I’d better open the trim box to check that it was correct.
It wasn’t. Apparently, when I’d ordered the tile for the shower, I’d somehow ordered the wrong color of trim. Because typical tiles have flat, unglazed edges, trim is used where the edges will be visible, either a contrasting metal or a matching rounded tile.
The trim that arrived did not match the shower wall tile. I double-checked the order, and somehow, I’d managed to select the color for the shower floor. It was my error, not the company’s. And that company does not accept tile trim returns for user error.
I prepared myself for the pain of purchasing replacement trim tiles, which are surprisingly costly. Moments from hitting the “order” button, I had a feeling that I should just look at the contrasting trim and see if we could simply use it.
It looked good. We did.
In this case, the grace, as I saw it, was mostly that the mistake was not a problem, but also that I thought to look in the box when it arrived (instead of being surprised upon installation), and when I thought to look again at everything instead of re-ordering.
That contrasting tile edge in our bathroom now reminds me that I’m not the one holding the universe together.
Grace might mean the ability to clean up our mess. I’m learning to simply be grateful that I can wipe up a spill, vacuum up glass, re-schedule when I’m double-booked, or sincerely apologize when I was wrong.
I think the protocol for mistakes that affect others is to openly confess to the error and make up for whatever we can. If I believe something I see online, share it, and later discover it’s misleading or outright false, I’d better own up to the error and let people know, rather than sweeping it under the rug. And if I drop and break your plate, I should replace it.
Perhaps you will have grace and tell me I don’t have to; perhaps by God’s grace, I will be able to get you a new one.
Grace might mean the mess is solved for us. I can’t count how many times I’ve over-scheduled myself only to have something end up canceled by another party. Or I’ve failed meal planning, and dinner gets solved another way.
I don’t want to be entitled, expecting all my messes to be solved for me. I’m just grateful that I am not the one holding my little corner of the world together.
Grace might mean something to learn. Sometimes, the thing to be grateful for is the lesson in it. I can find this ridiculously difficult (due to those “wrong-headed expectations of self-perfection”). But I know, logically, that I don’t have to get everything perfect the first time, and that with new tasks and situations, it’s likely not even possible.
My value as a human being is not in my perfect actions, and my perfections do not hold the world together. God is perfect. I don’t need to be. (Re: Jesus’s words, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”, GotQuestions has a decent summary. At a minimum, that certainly doesn’t refer to instant competence in all skills.)
I want to build the habit of gratitude for the lessons that come from mistakes. The lessons are grace to me, and to everyone affected by my learning.
Mistakes are also, as mentioned above, inevitable in the creative process. Sometimes failing faster is the quickest way forward. To fear mistakes is to take the longer way through, or not to get through at all. Thomas Edison famously found what filament works in a light bulb by first trying many, many filaments that didn’t work.
I can play with painting techniques or combinations of words in order to grow as an artist or writer, but only if I am willing to fail and try again.
I wrote about this in my first Substack letter, more than two years ago, and I seem to have to keep re-learning this. As I wrote in November, “many of us tend to stop when we get ‘insight’, as if new understanding is the same as change. We don’t always practice what we hear. We think insight automatically changes us, and we move on while the ‘change’ is too shallow to remain.”
But it must be grace for me even to learn that how I “learned” this wasn’t working, grace that God returned me to this lesson to learn it again. And I am grateful.
Sometimes, the grace is simply being able to let the mistake go. I’ve faced it, I’ve apologized for it, I’ve made up for whatever I needed to, I’ve ridden out the consequences. And I don’t have to hold onto it anymore.
I know the stakes aren’t always low. What if mistakes are costly—more than my tile oversight—or worse?
There is no point in “what if” with our God. If I can trust Him with things so tiny it surprises me that He cares, surely He is trustworthy with things of great consequence. He establishes our steps (Psalm 37:23-24; Proverbs 3:5-6, 16:9).
Accepting grace is different from flippancy. I’m still supposed to be faithful in planning, practice, and doing the best I can. One low-stakes example: The time for bread-baking experiments is usually when the bread is for our little household, not something I offered to bring to a dinner event.
A higher-stakes example: This is why I took a class in emergency landings. I can make loads of mistakes landing a virtual plane in a simulator, so that if something happens while Ed is flying, I have a better chance to land the real thing safely.
But I do not hold the universe together, not even my corner of it.
And neither does anyone else. The people we have the hardest time giving grace to—spouses, children, coworkers, other drivers on the road—are in God’s hand just as much as we are.
Their mistakes may have consequences, but God’s goodness and power, love and sovereignty, are bigger. God can repay us for what others’ errors have stolen, if that’s what’s needed. Which clearly leads to forgiveness—we are not owed payment from those who have hurt us—though that subject is largely outside the scope of this letter.
Now I get to practice seeing and accepting His grace until I believe it enough to live it. I get to learn better judgment, to live as faithfully as I can, and to rest in God Almighty’s powerful grace when I fail. I get to extend that grace to other people.
And when I make mistakes while learning about grace, there’s grace for those, too.
If you’re not yet following Jesus Christ, how do you handle mistakes or failures? Are you anxious that you have to get everything right?
I’m telling the truth when I repeat that there is Someone Good holding everything together, that it isn’t all on you and me. Even in the worst of cases, His grace and redemption are right there for His people.
You can find the Gospel (literally “good news”) spelled out clearly on my friend Tina Marie Cox’s website, Let’s Be Real: Real Good News. You can join God’s people by repenting and believing in Jesus Christ. Along with His saving grace, you will find the well of grace that doesn’t run dry—and you can offer it to others, too.
Writing Updates
I made a little progress on my novel. I’m at a spot that seems to require me to sit and design a place, because it isn’t real and I intend to describe it. I need more imagining and sketching than direct writing; it probably requires me to try things and “fail fast”.
I also started wading back into the waters of poetry. I used to write poetry, years ago, and many things have popped up that make me want to get back into it.
And, I wrote this letter.
That’s it for this February! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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