Grace for the Good Girl by Emily Freeman

The curtains in our bedroom are crumpled on the floor. The hardware gave way and shot slap out of the drywall. I tried to take it in stride, but standing there on a stool balancing one heavy-ended curtain rod while trying to get the other end to come out without scratching the ceiling, well. I cried a little. And clenched my fist tight like a toddler.

Just one more thing not going right today.


I don’t like when things don’t go right mainly because I worship order and control a lot of the time. I want to do stuff right and to be right, not just as in having the right answer, but to have things go right by me. I put those curtains up in haste some time last year. And having them fall out of the wall is direct evidence of my domestic failure, like they’ve been waiting for me to have a bad day before they reveal their secrets about me.

I don’t really believe I’m a domestic failure. Not usually, anyway. But when the laundry piles and the baseboards stink and the curtains fall off the wall, the word failure comes to mind.

I’ve circled around healing from my good girl ways for many years now, but there are still triggers that bring out the lies. And hearing them feels like finding a note from an ex-boyfriend. You aren’t attached to him anymore, but when you read the note suddenly you’re back there in college, standing in the middle of 15 years ago, feeling the sting of the break up. The feelings are real, but they are based on something that isn’t.

Shadows. Remnants. Untruths. That’s what it’s like to hear a lie in your head.

We carry around those fragments of untruth with us everyday. And when things happen all in a row, it dislodges the crazy and even though we know the truth, the lie feels more true at the time. We have to choose what we’ll believe. It doesn’t feel very romantic to say it that way, choose what you’ll believe. But I do believe we have a choice, even when it all goes wrong.
Grace is hard to swallow, mainly because I can't earn it and don't deserve it. If you've grown up in the church like me, grace might seem irrelevant to you. It felt irrelevant to me for a long time, too. I was a fairly self-sufficient person. Until, of course, I wasn't.

The gifts that bring us to the end of ourselves often come in the form of pain, disappointments, heartbreak, or curtains falling out of the wall one too many times. I'm learning to pick up those disappointments and turn them over in my shaky hands to search hard for the gift. In that place of brokenness, that place of having nothing to offer, He shows up ready and offers Himself to me.