Guest Post by Leta Sundet
I’m afraid of messing up. Not just of messing up in general, but of messing this up—the big This that is the story that is my life, the story that God is attempting to tell with me as His material.
The question casts its shadow over all my decisions. Can I ruin things? Is it possible for me to forfeit some good God intends for me or—worse—the people around me, by a sinful decision?
Say, hypothetically, I don’t relish the thought of hardship; so I don’t seize a challenging opportunity, and I miss my vocation. Say I’m afraid of rejection or of real, messy love, so I don’t risk a relationship with someone who might have been the Right One after all (and now I’ll never know). Say I safeguard my convenience and shun someone in need until it’s too late for me to help them, for anyone to help them.
Each one of those decisions, made in sin—I would have no trouble asking for forgiveness for it. But the exact nature of that forgiveness would be unclear to me. I know that Jesus died for my sins, that he will erase them from my record. But does grace mean that God will erase the consequences, the unraveling of those decisions? Rewind the tape? How could he?
And if, in fact, those decisions are irrevocable, shouldn’t I live in positive dread of sin? Not out of fear for my soul, which I know is safe, but out of fear for my story?
This question would be easier, I think if I wasn’t a Christian yet. Everyone loves a Cinderella story. Before the conversion, the deeper you dig yourself into the hole, the more triumphant the rescue; the more dirt, the more stunning the transformation. But after conversion, failure immediately becomes problematic—an enormous let-down, narrative-wise.
I’m haunted by those post-Davidic kings, by Solomon and his sons and grandsons, whose promising lives just drifted. Maybe Jesus harrowed hell and rescued Solomon’s soul, but could he salvage his story, or any of the other failed stories down there? That record is permanent; I know because I can go read it right now. And so I can’t help but imagine God, in the end, delivering up grace to Solomon—not reluctantly, of course—but with raised eyebrows, or maybe with a smack upside the head.
What about my story, I wonder, when I succumb yet again to one of those “besetting sins” (so conveniently named). Is my last page going to say something like, “At the end of her life, she looked back and felt pretty stupid. Which was at least a movement in the right direction. Finis.”
Paul has a way of, in the midst of what seems like dense theologizing, answering my pressing questions. Take Romans 5: “Since, therefore, we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (5:9-10). Whatever else Paul is doing in this passage, he is laying the claim of grace on our stories as well as our souls.
If I don’t know how he got to that answer, something is wrong, obviously, with my understanding of grace. But I think that is because something is wrong, first and foremost, with my understanding of sin.
From day one we learn to think of sins as places we should not go, actions we should not take, thoughts we should not think—aberrations from the norm. But I think this translates to naturally into conceiving of sins as forays outward, steps outside ourselves, movements away from what we were and into new terrain. And that’s not honest. In fact, that’s far too flattering to us.
I’m at a party, and I see her coming toward me. I dodge into the bathroom. I’ve been promising to talk to her (she always has something she needs to talk about). But I’m not feeling on top of my game tonight, I’m already crabby, and I already talked to a lot of other people I didn’t want to talk to. I need to let myself off the hook this time. And while I feel sort of guilty for it, checking my phone on the edge of the bathtub, I don’t feel guilty enough to come out.
I do kick myself for it later, and my contrition takes this form: I’ve missed an opportunity and I’ve initiated a dangerous pattern. Not only have I failed to realize the charitable potential in myself, I’ve also become a less charitable person, one who will find it even easier to be unkind again. Mr. Knightley’s “badly done Emma!” is ringing in my head, and I’m making all sorts of new resolutions—motivated by the dread that I’m steadily becoming a horrible person—to be kinder next time.
And I’ve entirely missed the point. Because when I gave her the cold shoulder, I wasn’t acting out of the blue. I wasn’t simply missing an opportunity for charity. I was revealing the depth of my lack of charity.
My sin wasn’t just in that cold shoulder. It was in the moment, infinitesimal and yet jam-packed, that only God could gaze at and analyze as if under a microscope, when I held those two choices in my two hands—dodge into the bathroom or not—and the Holy Spirit made his case for staying and the jury was moved, even leaned in his direction, but then my selfishness (calls himself “healthy sense of self-preservation”) sauntered out into the box, gave one rueful smile, and it was all over.
Because of that twelve-person jury, with all the usual variety of fears and lusts, troubled childhoods and suppressed memories, all trying to shout each other down, can only ever really agree on one thing: self-preservation.
Sin is not “messing up”; sin is never a “mistake.” The choice to dodge her, the choice to preserve myself at her expense—this choice was organic to me, consistent with my character, as natural a sight to someone who really knew me at the sight of an apple on an apple tree. And to someone (like, say, me) who does not really know me, the choice is an exposure, an unearthing, a revelation. I am a sinner not because I chose wrong. But because I am the kind of person who would do that.
This is bleak, perhaps—but I think it’s critical. Until we realize this, we don’t know what the story is really about. If we think we’re pretty decent people who occasionally do ugly things, then yes, those ugly things are disasters, each one a miniature tragedy, each sin a perfect miniature Macbeth. But the story is not about the hypothetical me who could have made the right choice back there. And it’s not even about the me who made the wrong choice instead. It’s about the me who would choose wrong. It’s about the me whose hatred came out with practiced ea , because I and my ancestors for generation upon generation have been honing that move to flawlessness. It’s about the me whose soul—whose saved soul—still has a vocal majority living inside it that doesn’t love Jesus.
How is this reassuring? How does this circle back to grace? Because when God signed up to deal with me, He was signing up to deal with me, not a hypothetical me. He made all those wild promises to someone He knew. He did not craft my story with another person in mind, and my sinful choices are not problematic to it. They are the stuff of it, because they are the stuff of me.
If God intends to rebuild me from the ground up, He is not going to lose heart at the sight of the rotten foundation: that was the point. Apparently I’m the only one who didn’t know.
I think this is what Paul means in Romans 5 when he says that wherever there is sin, there is grace at its elbow, wherever sin rises, grace bubbles up higher, wherever sin performs, grace upstages it. I imagine God scrambling, doing relief work, coming up with plan B’s and C’s for me until there are no more letters left in the alphabet. But God doesn’t scramble: in the words of Isaiah, His righteousness “will never be dismayed” (Isaiah 51:6). We simply cannot dismay Him.
Our stories are safe because they are enclosed by the love of a God who knows us down to the bone and still intends us good. The good He intends is not in spite of our sinful choices but—miraculously— in the teeth of them. The good He intends is in the give and take of each day, as we see our sins and name them and own them and reject them, as we begin to make choices out of a foreign love, as the life of Jesus makes its home in us, among all the disgruntled jury members, who are having a harder and harder time maintaining their old convictions. Sin may be deep, but now the Holy Spirit is deepest, pressing upwards with His mighty back, and when the sin comes pouring out, flushed out like a sewer, so that we look around in dismay and cry out what a disaster it is—it’s the opposite of a disaster.
Leta Sundet is a PhD student at the University of Dallas.
Note: This article originally appeared at Theopolis and is used with permission.
