Say More: At Last She Writes It

No. 37 | May 2025

Because of Grace

by Blakelee Ellis

Almost everything I’ve learned in my life hasn’t been learned

at a singular moment in time. Knowledge accumulates slowly like a consistent, pesky faucet drip that fills a kitchen sink. Most of the time, I don’t even know the faucet is dripping. It’s only until the sink is full that I realize water has been flowing all along. Occasionally, however, there are specific moments when I know that the faucet starts leaking; concrete and memorable events when I truly begin to understand a certain concept. I think the first time I truly began to understand the concept of grace was the first time I took my brother to a homeless shelter.

He called me, drunk and high with nowhere to go. My mom and my sister must not have answered their phones, I thought. He only calls me when he is desperate. I’m the last resort. For years we had been on prickly terms to put it mildly. When we were together, we generally just ended up yelling at each other. That afternoon, I picked him up and drove him into downtown Salt Lake. We hardly spoke to each other during the drive, but I do remember a brief conversation about whether God still loved him. He didn’t think so. If Heavenly Father still loved him, he said, he couldn’t feel that love at all. “Of course Heavenly Father loves you,” I said. “You just have to do better if you want to have the Holy Ghost with you.”

As we pulled up to the corner near the homeless shelter, he began to cry.

“Don’t do this to me, Blake,” he said. “I can’t do this. Just take me back to Mom.”

“No,” I replied. “You aren’t allowed there right now. This is the only place you can go.”

Through his sobbing I heard, “I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t know what to do either. We were both completely overwhelmed. All I could think of was to say a prayer. So, we wrapped our arms around each other, and I said a prayer out loud. I prayed for God to give him courage. I begged that he would be safe and that he would know that he could survive this. I asked that he would have help to get sober so he could feel Heavenly Father’s love. Finally, we broke apart and my brother got out of the car. He walked towards the homeless shelter with nothing but a backpack slung over his shoulder. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I stayed composed on my drive home and while I recounted the story to my husband. I decided to get ready for bed and as soon as I climbed into the shower, all my emotions came spilling out. I remember standing in the shower, water streaming over me, crying and saying, “Why did you do this to yourself?”

My brother came out publicly as gay when he was an early teenager. The shame and rejection from classmates, peers, and especially our ward members were severe. Almost overnight he went from being the most popular neighborhood kid to a being social pariah. He turned to substances to lessen his self-hate and to cope with all the turmoil in his personal life. At just 15 years old he became dependent on alcohol, and he has struggled with addiction ever since.

Anyone who deals with addiction, or has loved ones who do, knows how destructive this disease can be. Addicts become desperate for their next fix and unfortunately, this desperation led my brother to crime. Petty crime, at first, but as his addiction grew, so did his arrest record. Just like that, my family fell apart. I stood by as my parents sent my brother to rehab after rehab, praying that sobriety would stick. I watched my mother’s heart break and my parents’ marriage flounder. Unconsciously, I became the family fixer. I had to save my mom from all her pain and protect my sister in the best way I knew how. All this, it turns out, is a recipe for resentment.

I always felt like my parents weren’t severe enough in their punishment. I didn’t understand how my mom could continue to offer so much forgiveness, so much leniency when I believed that his actions demanded something different. There were clear rules in our life that he would not adhere to. When someone cannot or does not follow the rules, natural consequences follow. I resented my brother for destroying our family. I hated him. I took every opportunity to justify my hate, only I used a different name. I named my hate righteous judgment. I didn’t understand anything he was going through and honestly made no effort to do so. I could offer no kind words, no condolences, not a shred of compassion or love. Trauma played a part in my actions, but if I’m honest with myself, my love was conditional.

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I don’t know how or when we detoured from God’s path of true love. I only know that now that I’ve experienced it, true love through God’s grace is all I want.

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I told myself I was justified in my judgment, and this was only reenforced at church. I learned that even our Father in heaven, who loves us, still has rules. There are commandments and expectations given to us on this Earth because Heavenly Father loves us. Angels are “silent notes taking,” and Heavenly Father looks down on us all keeping track of our total points earned or lost. If those commandments are broken, natural consequences follow, suffering being one of them. Are you suffering? Maybe you should look at your life and figure out where you went wrong. The spirit withdraws and you lose points on that great scoreboard in the sky where God paces back and forth like a spiteful referee. You sure as hell better repent before you lose too many points and no longer qualify to live in the Celestial kingdom; That’s Heavenly Father throwing the ultimate penalty card. Be careful not to love someone too much or you might condone their unrighteous actions. Do you know someone who has gone astray? Please, call them to repentance because that’s what you do if you truly love someone. Your faith without works is dead, so get going. Earn those points.

Now I wonder how the good news of the gospel could get so mutilated. How have we lost the true message of grace? I don’t know how or when we detoured from God’s path of true love. I only know that now that I’ve experienced it, true love through God’s grace is all I want. It is the good news; the thing we all need in our lives, the message our souls truly yearn for.

In the Gospel of John, we learn that Jesus passed by a man who was born blind. Christ’s very own disciples ask,

“Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus answers, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”¹

The disciples see suffering as a punishment for some action. I also bought into the logic that suffering is a part of God’s plan, not just a natural outcome, but a moral outcome. I believed this was God’s law.

In his book Original Grace, Adam Miller teaches us that God ‘s law can be applied differently depending on if we use the logic of sin or the logic of grace.

According to the logic of original sin, the purpose of the law is punishment. The law’s purpose is to judge what is deserved. The law is a divine mechanism for judging who deserves to suffer (or not) and to what degree. The point of the law is accusation.

The logic of grace, on the other hand, takes the purpose of the law to be love. The law’s purpose is still to judge—but, now to judge what is needed. The law is a divine mechanism for judging what is needed to relieve suffering and liberate sinners. The point of the law is grace.

Sin uses God’s law to ask what is deserved.

Grace uses God’s law to ask what is needed.²

My view of God’s law began to change when I took my brother to the homeless shelter. Up to that point, I had been, for the most part, a bystander. That day I had actively participated in enforcing one of his consequences. Despite all my resentment, and righteous hate, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

The gravity of the situation began to hit me. My brother was homeless, penniless, without food and possibly going through withdrawals. My soul cracked wide open. I knew he would literally beg for money or anything else he could find useful. I prayed to God that someone would take pity on him, that somebody would have mercy on him. I prayed so fervently that someone would meet his needs. I didn’t care what he had done to get himself there, or even what he would do with any money he got. I just needed someone to show him a little bit of grace. I needed somebody to give him what he needed, not what he deserved.

“When he had thus spoke, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.”³

Jesus transforms all our logic of judgment, justice, punishment and moral order in this act. Jesus approaches this man, without any accusation, and divinely judges what is needed and then offers the needed grace. Grace asks us to look at God’s law in a different way. By the logic of grace, I was the sinner because I believed that my brother deserved his suffering. Thank God, through grace, I am on the endless journey of transformation. Through grace, I will be changed.

I acknowledge that our lives are complicated. Grace doesn’t look or behave the same in every situation. I’m the first to admit that sometimes boundaries are necessary. We need to protect ourselves and our families while doing everything we can to help those around us. I am not trying to imply that God expects us to enable people with harmful, destructive habits or put our own emotional, mental or physical safety on the line to help people. The second great commandment says, “Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself.”⁴ To love others, we must also love ourselves. God does not expect us to be a doormat that gets walked all over. God does not expect us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of good works. God asks us to love, contemplate, pray and then use grace to determine what we should do in any given situation. Undoubtedly, we will get things wrong sometimes. We will have regrets. We will need to make amends and do better next time around. But the only reason we can do all of that is because of grace.

My brother continues to struggle to stay sober. He texted me last Wednesday and let me know that he had been kicked out of his apartment and was homeless once again.

When we allow grace to work within us, grace can truly begin to work through us. It’s a constant process of unlearning and relearning. Of trying, failing and trying again because love is worth it. Grace is worth it. People are worth it.

My religious life has looked like God peeling away, layer by layer, my dogged beliefs in things that aren’t true and logics that don’t add up. It has looked like God stripping me of bad beliefs and false assumptions until I stood exposed, head bare and shoes removed, to a deeper and more original grace that, far from being a clean escape from suffering, turned out to be the substance of God’s enduring response to it.

—Adam Miller

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1. John 9:2-3

2. “Original Grace” by Adam Miller, pages 30-31

3. John 9:6-7

4. Matthew 22:39