Many thanks to listener, Juanita Verma, for her help in transcribing this episode!
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CW: Can I interrupt and say something? I think it's really interesting you just said that shame has kind of been your default. Is that how you said it?
SH: Yep.
CW: Okay, shame has not been my default, but my default has been good works and hustling. SH: Right.
CW: And just like you said, though, the good works and hustling didn't give me the transformation I needed either. So again, Susan, you and I are very different in this aspect and yet…
SH: Same problem.
CW: Same problem!
SH: Umm, hmmm
CW: We didn't get what we needed the most.
SH: Right.
CW: …from our, I don't know our religious practices our whole life, doing thing
Music and introduction of podcasters:
SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinckley.
CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is: The Grace Peddlers Are Back! It sounds a little, I want some capes. Can we get matching capes?
CW: I need a cape. It feels a little superheroish. (light chuckle)
Oh, I love that thought, actually. The “Grace Peddlers” with our capes or no capes. We're back! ( words are sung for emphasis).
SH: Well, sometimes I think of myself with a trench coat that I'm standing on the corner, going, psss.
CW: Well, over here, that goes really well with peddling, right? You're kind of this mischievous person on a corner in a trench coat peddling, peddling something everybody needs and they're not totally sure they need it yet though.
SH: Exactly.
CW: Umm (to indicate agreement).
SH: Well, here we are again, talking about, grace, it's been a while though. It's been a long time. And the reason we're talking about it is because on our recent last two episodes that we had with C.A. Larson about guilt and shame, (SH: UM HUM in agreement).
CW: It just kept surfacing. I feel like you and I just kept having these little “mini light bulb moments” where we were like, “Oh truly, truly, truly accepting grace here would solve so many of these guilty, shamey problems”. (SH: had said “right” after guilty)
So it's the end of our season, but you and I were like, we gotta squeeze this in, we'll take another topic or two! We thought we wanted to hit the season and push it to Season Eight. Because I, I think we both think that is, this is that important. And it's interesting. We had a Friday chat, I don't know, a month ago or so.
And a woman in there said about this very topic, she said, “we are already stunning and magnificent”!
SH: Um (in gentle appreciation for that kind remark)
CW: Okay, that's what would go on our cape, Susan!
SH: Okay!
CW: We would put, “Stunning and Magnificent”.
SH: You know what, let's put Stunning on one of our capes and Magnificent on the other. We'll be Stunning and Magnificent! (light laughter/chuckling from both SH and CH)
CW: I'm picturing two older ladies wearing capes with these words. (SH: supportive “Yeah!” during that sentence)
CW: This is hilarious already. So anyway, why did you, what did you think about this? Why are we going here again?
SH: Well, I mean, for all the reasons that you mentioned and in preparation for this, I thought I'm going to go back and listen to some of our previous grace episodes because I didn't want to just cover the same stuff. (CW: “oh you did?” while SH said this sentence)
Yeah! And so it turns out that this is our third, or depending on how you look at it, possibly our fourth episode on grace.
CW: Okay, yeah!
CW: So the previous episodes, just for anyone who cares and wants to go back, the first was Episode 16. So way back in Season One, we did a, “We Don't Believe Our Own Stuff, the Grace Edition”.
So that was the first one.
CW: Right.
SH: And then Episode 41, “Grace is the Antidote”. And we did that, we recorded that episode in response to a previous episode. We had, we had a similar experience on, after we recorded our episodes about obedience.
CW: Really? (said with excited emphasis)
SH: Yeah. Then we recorded “Grace is the Antidote” because we had talked about some of the problems of obedience and exact obedience and things like that.
CW: Oh my!
SH: And so then we decided we have gotta do a grace episode. So it was also in response in the ways that this one is. And then Episode 74 is the “Parable of the Laborers, Grace in Action”. So we have talked about this before.
I didn't think of going back to listen to those episodes until after I'd already written my notes for this episode.
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