Episode 16 (Transcript): We Don't Believe Our Own Stuff—Grace Edition

Episode Transcript

S: Hello! Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Susan Hinckley, and I'm here with my friend, Cynthia Winward. Hi, Cynthia!

C: Hello, Susan. Glad to be here.

S: Me too. The sun is shining. I've got a banana cream pie cooling in the fridge as we speak. So life is about to get very good at my house after this. I'm happy to be here.

C: Thank goodness for banana cream pie. That sounds good.

S: Thank goodness for every pie, Cynthia!

C: Yeah. Thank goodness.

S: When we can't have cake, you know. It makes a nice change from cake.

C: I'm not picky!

S: You can't eat cake all the time. Uh, today our topic is We Don't Believe Our Own Stuff: The Grace Edition. And grace is a huge topic! How do we think we can take this on in one episode? I don't really know, but it's one of our favorite topics, yours and mine both. And so I'm excited to take a stab at it and we'll see where the conversation takes us. I was perusing Facebook this morning, as I was putting my thoughts together for this episode, and I came across a post—it was just a few minutes before we came on here—a post by Anne Lamott, one of my favorite faith writers and thinkers, Patron Saint of Humanness for me. She is just one of my all time favorites, but she said something that I thought was a perfect introduction. And here's what she said:

When my son was five or six, we were visiting my friends in the city, when all of a sudden we heard a tiny distressed voice. We turned toward the sound. My son, Sam, had managed to get his head stuck in the slats of a chair he had been clamoring on. He stared at us like a dwarf in the stocks of Salem. He said, "I need help with me."

I live by these words. The two friends had his words calligraphied and framed for us. I have it on the wall of my office. I need help with Me. I need help. We all do, and it is how it should be. We need help with Us. It is the prayer of the miserable and scared and very stuck who still against all odds believe that we can be changed and freed.

S: We need help with us, Cynthia.

C: Hmmm...that's a great introduction to grace.

S: Isn't it a great introduction? Because it sort of highlights that we need help, but you know, rather than weakness, the needing help is actually transformational.

C: Yes, it is.

S: The needing help is how we reach for and access grace. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. And how we decided to kick off this discussion was, Cynthia had been asked to speak in sacrament meeting on grace, and I remember when she did it and I had loved the talk. So I thought it would be a wonderful idea if she would share that with us today as sort of a framework for the conversation. And then we'll talk about it.

C: Okay. So, I was asked to give this talk a year ago, and I knew something important had happened when after sacrament meeting, there were people lined up, Susan. I mean, lined up! Like it was almost embarrassing how many people—you know, I'm not a celebrity obviously, of any sort, but I'm like, is this what goes on with famous people? There were so many people lined up that wanted to talk to me about my talk.

Some people wanted a copy of it. Others had questions. They wanted some references. And then I continued to get more feedback from it. And I thought, you know, this is a very simple yet profound topic—grace—and that's when it hit me again. Oh my gosh! We don't even believe our own stuff, because my talk wasn't anything super fantastical. It was just that it's something we don't talk about a lot. And I felt like, wow—I kind of struck a nerve with people. This was something we're kind of desperate to hear about. So I'm just going to go ahead and read my talk—it's only 10 minutes—but we'll kind of stop at different points and we'll have a discussion. How's that, Susan?

S: I think that sounds great.

C: Okay.

I was asked to speak on the topic of Grace. Now, what you need to know is that unless the bishopric had asked me to speak on how to bake the perfect lemon merengue pie, there isn't another topic I have researched more, cried over more, and prayed about more. I have pored over talks on grace by Elder Uchtdorf to the now famous BYU speech on grace by Brad Wilcox, as well as the many parables Jesus gave on grace, and have read every book by the LDS philosopher, Adam Miller, who wrote such books as Grace is Not God's Backup Plan. Isn't that the best title for a book? Indeed. Grace is not the backup plan.

A few years ago, I was hungry for messages of grace. I began to notice how often we hear the word in our hymns, particularly the sacrament songs. So I kept a note card in my church bag that I pulled out every time I heard a sacrament song about grace.

Here are some of my favorites:

And my Spirit's grace shall be like a fountain unto thee...

The very foes who slay thee have access to thy grace...

I once was lost, but now I'm found...

(that's from Amazing Grace, which obviously is not in our hymnal)

And my favorite:

I stand all amazed at the love Jesus offers me, confused at the grace that so fully He proffers me.

So what even is grace? To be in someone's good grace is to be seen as favorable, to be worthy of being favored. Grace is given without requirement. And since it isn't a loan, it cannot be paid back. When we speak about grace as Latter-day Saints, we often quote scriptures like 2 Nephi 25:  "For we know we are saved by grace after all we can do." Elder Uchtdorf says:

I wonder if sometimes we misinterpret the phrase 'after all we can do?' We misunderstand that 'after' does not equal 'because.' We are not saved because of all that we can do. God's grace is available to all whose hearts are broken and whose spirits are contrite. Elder Uchtdorf then goes on to say that, "Salvation cannot be bought with the currency of obedience. It is purchased by the blood of the son of God.

I think I have obsessed over this topic because at some point in every adult's life, or maybe even for some of our youth, you realize, like I have, I cannot be obedient enough. I can't do enough. I can't believe enough. I don't just need something to fill the gaps, but I need something to fill me 100%.

So, what do you want to say about that so far, Susan?

S: Well, Cynthia, I came to the topic of grace myself after realizing that my religion hadn't given me what I needed to face my own mortality. And I think I've talked about that on the podcast before—that awful moment that I had, right? Where I thought, "Oh, my demise is going to come sooner than I thought it was! And where's the peace?" It just wasn't there. And so, you know, I really had to start looking around and grasping for what might be missing, what went wrong.

And so I love that you referenced the scripture, "We're saved by grace after all that we can do," because one of the things that I landed on in that kind of self analysis and reaching was that the second part of that sentence might've been allowed to hijack the first in my own life.

C: Totally.

S: You know? And it's not that we don't believe in grace because I mean, we obviously do, but somehow in my Mormon experience, you know, works had been featured more prominently in the teaching that I had heard. It was always about works. It was about what I was doing, or needed to be doing, and not about grace.

And the problem with that is that the first part of that sentence, "We are saved by grace," is where the hope lives!

C: Yeah. It's a complete sentence.

S: That's a complete sentence and should be, right? I mean, that is the good news. When you talk about the good news of the gospel, isn't that what we're talking about?

C: I hope so.

S: That we're saved by grace. The second part of it feels more like a treadmill. Doesn't it?

C: That's a great way to explain it, yes!

S: I mean, after all we can do—after all we can do, Cynthia—do and do and do and do and keep doing because you haven't done all you can do yet! That's sort of how that feels to me. And so, you know, in a way it just sort of sucks all of the hope out of the room that the first part of the sentence just put in there.

So I sometimes wonder if we might have misunderstood that sentence. You know, I like to think of it maybe more like, "We're saved by grace after all is said and done." More that kind of thing. I'm not totally sure that the emphasis was placed in the right place and I don't know who to blame for that! I don't know whether to blame my own faulty hearing—

C: I agree.

S: —the faulty hearing of, you know, millions of members of the Church. Or maybe some leader kind of preferred that emphasis along the line and it got kind of codified into doctrine in a way, or even folk doctrine. But it's certainly the way that I've heard it taught at church. I don't know, what about you? Has that been your experience?

C: Oh, I absolutely think that scripture has kind of been hijacked. I feel like we took the second half and ran with it on that treadmill. And like you, I don't know where—I don't know where that happened, I don't know where that started.

S: Yeah, so the question becomes, why do we prefer being on the treadmill? You know? Why do we find ourselves in this kind of setup where we have this loving God who has devised this plan that we're destined to fail?

C: Yeah, destined to fail.

S: We're destined to fail. Our inability to beat the odds has to be by design, but if you take it at face value, it feels pretty futile. There's this sort of 'why bother' aspect to our whole earthly experience. If we know we can't be perfect, why try? So the fact that every person in the world sins, and that we all sin in the same ways, and that we continue to do the same things over and over, tells me that sin is the boring part of all this.

And a lot of emphasis gets put on sin in religion, but it's really got to be the boring part because there is little innovation going on in the world of human sin. Sin's just our default setting. It's nothing more than that, right? There's no growth. There's no change. There's nothing. We don't move forward in any way as a result of our sins. I mean, I would defy you to think of a truly original sin because you can't do it. Everything in the world has been done before. As human beings, we are just never-endingly predictable. And therefore we are utterly boring in our sins.

However, you know, when we start to kind of change the way we think about sin—when we harness sin for use as a vehicle to access grace—then sin suddenly becomes the part that actually propels us forward. Right? I mean, that's where all the meaning and all the importance are. That's where things get interesting because that's the place where there are opportunities for growth. So it's not that we sin that's important, it's what we do next with it.

C: Totally.

S: Do we actively reach for grace?

C: Hmm.

S: You know, the ubiquitous nature of boring old sin may actually be the most brilliant part of the plan, but not in the way that we think of it.

C: I don't think we see it that way.

S: No, we don't see it that way! But you know, sin really is like the necessary fuel for self-improvement and for growth. Keep doing the same stupid things = keep needing to try to do something better. Right?

C: Yes.

S: Keep reaching toward Christ for a never-ending supply of grace. Without sin, you know, there would be no reach.

C: Yeah. If we don't keep messing up, then why do we need that relationship with Jesus Christ? We don't.

S: Right.

C: We got this! You know, at that point then it's, "We got this!" We don't need Him, and that's not part of the plan. I think what I love about our plan is—you know, I once had a therapist say to me, "I believe that we are here for relationships." And that really struck a chord with me.

And so when I think about my religious life, my spiritual life, I think about my relationship with Jesus Christ. And by relationship. I mean I need Him. I need that grace. I need His help daily and messing up is kind of the vehicle to me needing Him more.

S: It is! We need help with Us, right?

C: Yeah. We need help with Us.

S: We need help with Us. And, you know, I love that you emphasize the relational aspect of it because it's really like the reaching—the reaching part of it, for Christ—to me, that's a hopeful act. The screwing up continually doesn't even feel like a treadmill to me when I think about the reaching.

C: Hmm.

S: But when I think about the screwing up continually as 'I'm always indebted, I'm always in trouble, I'm always whatever,' and needing to do better so that I can qualify for grace, so that I can be worthy of grace—when I think of it that way, then there's no hope at all there for me.

C: No, that's icky.

S: Yep. That's icky and I'm just not going to succeed at that. I'm not going to succeed after all I can do. So, yeah, all right, go on with your talk. I want to hear what's next.

C:  Let's go on.

How could I have done everything I possibly could and end up a broken middle-aged woman? I'm embarrassed to admit I felt betrayed by my own obedience. How did this happen? How could I have spent my life doing everything I possibly could, and yet feel like I was stuck in a dark pit? I was just so angry! This wasn't fair! And then I read these words by LDS philosopher, Adam Miller:

One strategy for avoiding God's grace is to put God in your debt. Here, the more obedient I become, the less I figure I'll be indebted. The less grace I'll need. And the more in control I'll become.

That's what had happened! I thought I had put God in my debt. I was refusing His grace in favor of my own accomplishments. I needed to reframe. I needed to start doing something differently.

So I started to take a second look at scriptures that I have learned about my entire life that say, "Faith without works is dead," and "We are saved by grace, after all you can do," to find out if there could be a different interpretation than our standard LDS one. And in my research, I now interpret these scriptures differently than before. I am saved because even after I do all that I can, it is still grace. No matter how many times I have read the Book of Mormon, guess what? It is still grace that saves. No matter how many times I go to the temple, guess what? It is still grace that saves. No matter how many earrings I don't wear, or tithes I give, or meetings I attend, after all of that, it is still the grace of Jesus Christ that saves. No matter what I do, I will still be an unprofitable servant.

I realize grace can seem like a radical message and not one we talk about much, but after learning all of this, I was so excited to share with my children what I had learned. So I decided we needed to have a family home evening lesson on grace. After teaching them excitedly everything I just said to you, one of my teenagers leaned back threw out her arms, and said, "Well, this makes me not want to try at all then!" I told her, "Isn't it wonderful? You don't have to bludgeon yourself with perfectionism. You can let go of the burden of inadequacy. His yoke is easy and His burden is light." I explained to my kids, we try to keep the commandments and to be obedient because we love God, because when we are converted to Jesus and his gospel, we will have no more disposition to do evil. Keeping the commandments changes from being transactional—I do this and God gives me this—to transformational. It literally transforms us so that when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as he is.

When we finally buy into grace, it is liberating. We realize God isn't keeping score. In fact, Jesus came to crush the scoreboard. He paid for everything. We just need to do simple things like come each week and partake of the sacrament. It is one of the ultimate graces we have. Each week we come here and hear words in the sacrament prayers, such as remember, willing, and witness. That feels really doable to me! I can do that much. I am willing and I am happy to be a witness to His grace.

S: Oh, my gosh, Cynthia, there is so much in that part. I love that part! I just love it. I was thinking about when you talk about your daughter and her reaction to it, you know, I had a similar conversation with my sister, not that long ago, where—I don't remember what I was explaining to her—something, we were talking, something about grace, and she said the exact same thing. She said, "Well then, what's the point? Why do I even need to try?"

C: Yeah. It's not a unique thought.

S: No, it obviously isn't!

C: We go straight there!

S: Well, I couldn't believe that my sister went straight there! But then, you know, after a few minutes, I thought, yeah, of course she did, because that's kind of where the math takes you, as it's laid out. You know, I often think of that scripture, "I the Lord am bound, when ye do what I say," and this is why I love that idea that Adam Miller brings up of putting God in our debt, because that's exactly sort of where that scripture can take you, if you're just focusing on that part of it. There's something really nice about the idea that you can craft guarantees for yourself in this life, right?

C: Ooh, yes, control!

S: Ah, we love control. We've already established that. You love it. I love it. We all love it. And so if we can just control what we do, then we control all the outcomes, we control everything. And so I think that's where that comes from, but it's so interesting to me that there is something about the Mormon approach—there must be, I can only assume that there is, if this is a common response—that leads us to believe that we can control God, basically. For lack of a better way to say it. And that's just not a good starting place, really, for grace. For allowing grace. That's more a kind of set up for perfectionism, and you know what? I happen to know a lot of Mormon women have problems in that area, too.

C: Umhmm.

S: Perfectionism runs rampant and it's poisonous. Perfectionism is basically nothing more than a stumbling block. And you know, Christ made that very clear just about every time that he opened his mouth to the Pharisees. He pointed out how all of their careful following of rules completely distorted their focus, right?

C: Absolutely.

S: It got in the way of them getting everything that they were supposed to from religion. It got in the way of them even understanding the point of the rules themselves. It got in the way of them keeping the weightier matters of the law.

C: Yeah. Talk about hijacking.

S: Exactly. It totally hijacked it. And so Jesus pointed that out again and again and again. Somehow, I don't know, they wanted the control, I guess, that they felt like the rules afforded them. But you know, in my experience, perfectionism kind of intensifies our inward focus, right? By exaggerating the importance of minutiae, perfectionism actually causes us to become small.

C: Ohh.

S: Perfectionism is the anti-growth. Focus gets smaller and we contract. It's a contracting. It's not an expanding. And certainly our relationship with Christ and our spiritual life is meant to be expansion.

You know, I've found—I've been a working artist for decades, as you know, and I've worked across many different mediums, and I have found this pattern in myself that I cannot seem to break, and it goes like this: I decide I want to try something new, something I've never done before. And so I do, I begin to experiment with whatever the medium is and I start to create work, and it's—there's something in it that's good. I can see that there's promise there, right? So I get excited about it. It's worth pursuing. But I want to get better at it. So I practice more, and as my technical expertise improves, my expectations for myself continue to go up, right? I want to get better at it. And my work becomes more careful. And then it becomes more careful, and then it becomes even more careful because I want technical perfection! And you know, I've gotten good at quite a few things by following this path, but here's how it goes for me—as my work becomes more perfect, it actually begins to suffer artistically. It loses that little spark of something that it had at the beginning.

C: Hmm.

S: It's something that I can't quite put my finger on, but all of my carefulness somehow knows how to find that ineffable, raw something and squash it.

C: Wow, Susan!

S: Even knowing this about myself, and knowing it for years, I cannot seem to disrupt this pattern. But you know, even the most perfectly executed work of art is not really worth anything if it doesn't have the spark, right? If it doesn't have the thing in art that can't be really quantified, the very essence of the thing, the thing that separates it from all other things.

C: Right—that's what makes it art.

S: Without that sort of unique whatever-it-is, all the perfect execution in the world can not elevate it to the same heights. You could just go take a photograph if that's what you wanted, you know, you could just do a perfect representation of the world, but art is meant to be something beyond that and I can not get it through technical perfection. I can only kill it that way.

That's my own experience. So, you know, as I've thought about that over the years, I've had to ask myself, what is my carefulness—or my small focus, my perfectionism—what in my life might that be getting in the way of? What am I squashing about myself every time that I try to be perfect? Because I have to think that there's a parallel there of some kind.

You know, I've done a lot of study of folk art, all the traditions around the world, but in a lot of them, including in American quilting—which is where I first kind of encountered the idea, and I know you're a quilter also, so this might be of interest to you—there is a convention in which they purposely include a mistake in the work.

C: Yeah!

S: As an acknowledgement of the artist's imperfection, in comparison to the perfection of God. And in quilting, it's called a humility patch. Have you ever seen that in a quilt?

C: I haven't seen it, but I have heard the technique before about including imperfection.

S: Yeah, so it's the quilter making one block—the humility patch—that they do purposefully wrong. You know, they either turn it on its side, or some use a fabric in it that's different, or make some kind of obvious mistake that somehow disrupts the pattern. And I have always been so drawn to that. I find it to just be utterly charming. And when you can find a quilt, like an antique quilt, that has a humility patch, the value to collectors goes way up.

C: Oh, that's cool.

S: I know. It's great. But what makes it so appealing to me—what I love about it—is that for me, somehow, the work—the quilt—suddenly becomes very relatable. Or accessible. Because somehow in the humility patch, I find a place for myself to rest. If that makes sense.

C: Oh, okay.

S: You know, it's like—I think Leonard Cohen has the famous line about the “cracks where the light gets in”—the humility patch is sort of like that. It's sort of like an entry point for grace to come into the work. It's a place for imperfection to elevate the work, that you cede control and maybe get something better as a result of that. It's so much more—a quilt with a humility patch, to me, is so much more interesting to look at—

C: Isn't it?

S: —than something that's perfect. Yeah. So there have to be larger lessons in that.

I have had a lot of people say to me in conversations about grace, "Well, you know, are you sure you're not just trying to justify things? Trying to make it easy for yourself?"

C: Oh, of course they say that!

S: And I don't really see it that way. Elder Holland had this quote—he gave a talk that people talk about a lot still, about Be Ye Therefore Perfect...Eventually. Do you remember that talk at all?

C: Yeah, yes.

S: It was a very popular talk, I think for the same reasons the sacrament meeting talk that we're talking about of yours today was. I think people found something in it that they'd been starving for, or that felt accessible to them.

But in that talk, he said this:

Yea, come into Christ and be perfected in Him, Moroni pleads. Love God with all your might, mind and strength. then by his grace, you may be perfect in Christ. Our only hope for true perfection is in receiving it as a gift from heaven. We can't earn it. Thus, the grace of Christ offers us not only salvation from sorrow and sin and death, but also salvation from our own persistent self criticism.

C: Ooh yeah.

S: Yeah. Allowing myself, grace—stepping into grace rather than, you know, spinning in relentless self criticism, which is sort of my default setting—I think that actually is the peace that was missing in that critical moment I had when I really needed my religion, but somehow it came up short. When the peace wasn't there, I think grace was a big part of what was missing for me.

C: Yeah. Grace is the plan.

S: Yeah, grace is the plan! We should have named our episode, Grace IS the Plan.

C: (laughs) Yeah.

S: That might've been a good name actually, but Cynthia, do we believe it? But do we believe it?

C: No…I dunno.

S: Go on in your talk. Let's hear where it goes next. I'm still hopeful!

C: I'm hopeful. All right.

For months and months, I have been thinking about three specific grace-filled parables: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. In these three stories, it seems to me, Jesus is teaching powerful messages about his grace.

With the lost sheep, the shepherd leaves the 99 to find the one. The sheep does nothing to be found. The story is all about the shepherd, who does all the finding. Also with the lost coin. It, too, does nothing to be found. Also, the coin's value doesn't change when it was lost to when it was found. It's worth the same all the time.

And the prodigal son—there was nothing he could do to not be the father's son. He just was. And when he comes to himself and realizes he is tired of eating pig food, he realizes that even his father's servants get nice bread. So he rehearses a speech to give to his dad. And before he even has a chance to deliver it, the father comes running to greet him. He doesn't wait around for his lost son. He sees him, sees his willingness, and runs to him and doesn't just give him bread, but gives him a feast. Likewise, God meets us where we are at. He, too, runs to us. He doesn't even make us beg for crumbs. He's always willing to give us a feast.

S: I absolutely love the imagery in those parables that you addressed there.

C: Isn't it great?

S: Oh, it's so great! The idea that the coin does nothing to be found—

C: No!

S: —that's just powerful.

C: Yeah, yeah. And in all those stories—in each of those stories—it's all about the finding. It's all about the person finding them.

S: So how can we read those stories and hear them, talk about them and teach them, hundreds of times throughout our lives, and sort of miss or overlook that import—that critical—element in them?

C: I don't even know the answer to that, Susan. I don't even—I don't even know—

S: (laughs) How can we be so stupid, Cynthia?  How can I be so stupid?

C: Exactly! Yeah, master of the obvious! Like this should be so obvious to us and yet it isn't, and I don't even understand why. I mean, first of all, I have to say that those thoughts about the coin and about the 99 and—the 99 sheep and leaving those to find the one—these thoughts came from Rob Bell. I know a lot of people love the Robcast, and it's a fantastic podcast. So it took him—it took me listening to someone outside of our faith, who is a Christian. He was talking about these three parables and the finding and the losing and the value, and how the value never changes. And I was listening to it again today because it's one of my favorite episodes—it's called, from Rob Bell, You Are Already At the Party. And it's from his podcast in October of 2018, if people want to look that up. You Are Already At the Party.

Anyway, and so I'm listening to it today, I'm painting my nails, and my daughter comes into the room and she sits down and she's listening. And she's just blown away. Just blown away! Like you said, Susan, why isn't this so obvious to us? So anyway, we had a good discussion about it. But when you realize what the moral of these stories are, you go, "Duh!"

S: Well, you know, I've thought a lot about why it is that we seem to miss some of the most—or from my observation seem very obvious to other religions—some of those things we fail to emphasize that other religions do. And holy envy is an emotion that I experience a lot, actually.

C: Me too.

S: And I used to feel really bad about that because I used to think, well, what is wrong with me? I should not be looking at these other religions, and wishing that ours had what they had. That doesn't seem like that's the way it's meant to be. What's wrong with me? But you know, I've really come to feel like those things are speaking to me because they're things that I need to internalize, grasp, make my own, grow into, learn to understand, you know—sorry that I might've had to find them somewhere else! That doesn't invalidate their importance. And I'm just glad that they were speaking loud enough...somewhere. Somewhere in my peripheral vision that sign was blinking, enough that I was able to see it and access the ideas that I really needed to grow. Because my growth had stagnated in some pretty important areas, I realized by about the time I got into my fifties. Yeah, there just wasn't a lot of growth happening. And I feel bad about that as a Mormon woman. I feel bad that it wasn't happening for me in my own tradition, in some important areas, but grace is definitely one of those.

And so I've thought a lot about what might happen to us that would make it so that the focus was not in the places that were really speaking to my heart at this time in my life. And, you know, I can't escape the feeling that part of why we sort of struggle to embrace things like grace, or to amplify them in our teaching or in our speaking, is that it makes us a little bit less special in a way. I feel like a lot of focus gets put in our church on the things that make us a peculiar people, right? On temple work, on some of the parts of our doctrine that are, you know, appreciably different from some of the other Christian traditions. feel like we focus on those because they are identifiers of what we believe to be.

C: Yeah. They set us apart.

S: Yeah, they set us apart. They set us apart, and so they get emphasized. We like to be reminded—we like to be reminded of the ways that we are chosen in some way or, you know, special.

And I feel like by acknowledging something like grace, that is freely available to all—we're a little more comfortable in the zero sum game where we have the majority of the truth, if not all the truth. We want to share the truth, bring it to everyone. We want to bring—but we want to be the vehicle that delivers it, in a way.

C: Yes, we do.

S: Maybe that's really cynical of me to say that—

C: Eh, I don't know...

S: —but I'm just being very honest about it. That's all I've been able to come to as I've racked my brain about why do we ignore some of these things that seem so easy for other religions? And grace is a big one of those.

C: I have a friend who is a Baptist pastor. And I grew up with him, and we were instant messaging each other a few years ago. And I can't remember—I think I had posted something about grace online. 'Cause like I said, Susan, this has been like the topic for me for several years now! And I think I had posted maybe a quote by Adam Miller about grace on my Facebook profile or something, and we ended up having this side conversation. And like I said, he's a Baptist preacher. And he said to me, Susan, he said, "It's really good to see that Mormons are finally coming around to grace." And I didn't really know what to say to that because I—of course I wanted to be defensive and be like, this has always been there!

S: Right.

C: And of course we talk—I just really wanted to be extremely defensive and in the end, I just kind of let his statement stand there. I don't even remember what I said to it, but I'm pretty sure I didn't defend it because he's kind of not wrong.

S: No, I think he's not wrong! I mean, I have heard more about grace, I think, in the past maybe five years, than in the entire rest of my church life.

C: Absolutely!

S: And I'm not totally sure why that is.

C: Right.

S: But when I look at it from a personal standpoint, you know, maybe Cynthia, maybe we're meant in our spiritual progression to have to get so hungry for something that we really go after it for ourselves. Maybe it's meant to be that way.

C: Totally believe that.

S: You know, maybe grace is something that there's no way that I could really fully internalize it or understand it without really, really being hungry for it.

C: Yeah.

S: And maybe institutionally it's the same thing. Maybe as a church we needed to get so hungry for something that we didn't have, that we could collectively kind of, you know, step to a higher place or larger conversation.

C: I don't know what to say about that collectively, but I know individually, I totally agree with you. I totally agree that as an individual, I had to come to a place of complete brokenness, like I talked about in my talk, where I felt completely empty and I was grasping for straws. And it wasn't until that moment of desperation that I started doing the real homework of what grace is. And there's this great quote, by Adam Miller again, where he says, "Grace is free, but it certainly isn't cheap."

And yeah, to surrender, to say to Jesus, "Okay, let's do it your way," oh my gosh! That's not cheap. That's really—that's really hard won. Or, you know—and I'm just speaking for myself, but that has been really, really...those have been really hard lessons for me to learn. And I'm pretty sure, being the person that I am, being a doer and a rule keeper and, you know, as Mormons our beehive—you know, the busy bees—like being that kind of a person that just is a worker bee and gets things done, it took being this broken worker bee for me to say, "Let's do it your way." So yeah, grace is free, but it ain't cheap. It is not cheap, Susan, not for me anyway.

S: And darn it if it doesn't always come back to control! Honestly, Cynthia, how could every single conversation I have circle back to control? Perhaps I have not yet gotten the point. I don't know. I've told this story many times and I don't think I've told it on this podcast, but I'm sure you've heard me tell it, that I had this Baptist friend who used to tell me to "offer it up" all the time. You know, I'd be complaining about something, railing about problems in my life, and she'd say, "Offer it up, Susan, just offer it up." And Cynthia, honestly, I had no idea what she was talking about!

C: Yeah, what does that mean?

S: Somehow my Mormonism had not prepared me to understand what it meant to offer it up, but this idea that you suggest of, you know, "Okay, Jesus, let's do it your way," that's what she's talking about. And I guess I just hadn't come to that place yet. But so, what about people who never come to that place? I have to wonder, because I feel like I know people, people to whom I'm very close and for whom I have a great deal of respect—even, you know, some people that I might call spiritual giants in a way—that I'm not totally sure that they have yet gotten to the place of understanding that they're going to have to offer it up. I don't know. I don't know! I don't know what happens—

C: I think the same thing.

S: —I mean, I guess everyone's life maybe will bring them there at some point. And you know, maybe what's important for me isn't important for everyone.

S: What it makes me wonder is, if we can't get to that place where we can fully accept and understand grace for ourselves, then how on earth can we allow it for other people? And I feel like, you know, collectively—institutionally as a church—we're not that good at allowing grace for other people. Forget about how we feel about it for ourselves, whether we really don't believe our own stuff—

C: Yeah.

S: —it's vital, it's essential, that we understand granting it to others.

C: I agree with you.

S: How else do we learn to love other people? How else do we suggest good news? You know, how do we bring anyone into the fold that we're not willing to allow utter and complete grace for? And it's just something that I don't think we're good at yet.

C: Yeah. Yeah, forget the idea of grace being—it's not just a name for how God saves us. Right?

S: Right.

C: It really needs to be who we are and how we treat other people, and how we extend that grace to others. I totally agree.

S: That's exactly it. Grace needs to be who we are and what we are as a people.

C: I don't understand either why we aren't so good at that as a people.

S: And you know, if we can't get off the treadmill, if we can't step off the treadmill long enough to not only just acknowledge, but embrace our own imperfection—this inherent imperfection that we are never going to be able to overcome ever, no matter how many good works we do—if we can't do that, how are we ever really going to learn to love and embrace other people in their imperfections? And that is pretty much our number one job. That's our job.

C: Well, it's our number one job, and it's going to be a relentless job. Like there's never not a time where we have to extend grace to others because they're not perfect either. So it's always necessary.

S: Maybe this is another example of a thing not being what it is. We think the treadmill is supposed to be of our own works. The treadmill that we're actually supposed to be on—the relentless thing—is offering grace to others and giving grace to ourselves. Yeah, that's the real test, right? That's the real test.

C: Ooh, that's the real test, yeah. Love one another, as I have loved you? Imagine that?

S: Imagine that.

C: Yes, imagine that!

S: I'm still working on it.

C: Yeah.

S: I'm not there yet. Cynthia. I'm not there yet. Oh gosh, why don't you bring us home with the conclusion of your beautiful talk?

C: So this is how I closed my talk. I said in closing, here's one more line from Amazing Grace:

'Tis grace that brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home

I have a testimony that God's love for us is infinite, and that He is always ready to lead us home.

And that's how I ended it. And I could not have written this talk 10 years ago, because like I said, I kind of had to reach the end of my rope, but I also think collectively within our church, like you said, you haven't been hearing too much about grace for, you know, maybe the last 5 or 10 years, right? I feel like that's what ended up being so meaningful about my talk to other people is it was kind of this amalgamation of all these little talks, like I said, that we've been hearing here and there. You know, Elder Uchtdorf, when he gave his talk, The Gift of Grace, and then Brad Wilcox, you know, in his speech, His Grace is Sufficient and, you know, Adam Miller. I just feel like we're kind of getting this ball rolling finally, Susan, and I'm excited for it. I really am. I'm really excited that this ball is rolling and it's catching momentum and it's getting faster and faster, um, that we're going to talk more and more about grace because—I really can't be enough, Susan. I just can't. I'm tired.

S: No, no you can't.

C: And I'm worn out.

S: Yeah. And I look around at everything that's going on in the world right now, and I just keep thinking, are we hungry enough yet? Are we hungry enough yet for something that we obviously haven't been able to do for ourselves and can't do for ourselves? Because you know, when we get to that point, that might be when we actually receive the sweet relief that we're looking for.

And it will come in the form of grace for ourselves and for others, and understanding—really understanding—and internalizing that principle and living into it.

C: It's the lesson.

S: It's the lesson. Thank you so much for opening the door for this conversation, Cynthia, and for being willing to share your beautiful insights with us. I really appreciate it.

C: Thank you. Thanks for discussing it with me.