when I choose the economy of God

"So, I guess you're going to have to figure out three things."This is my husband, in the still, dark room where we sit and write with the rain outside and the quiet inside. He's talking about gratitude, something I'm resisting, and I don't have a good reason, I should tell you that right now.Actually, I should tell you that I have some bad reasons.In the economy of an anxious heart, your minus columns are always outlasting your positive ones. In the economy of a perfectionist heart, a minor dip in expected performance is the 1929 crash of Wall Street. A lower grade than you expected of yourself or a missed opportunity to make friends with someone or some nice thing you can't quite put your finger on but you're sure you failed to do. You name it for yourself and suddenly it is another thing you've forgotten, and you work and live on an ever steepening incline of failure, and somewhere along the way you're also drowning in your own misunderstanding of yourself, and you've mixed your metaphors together so you are a drowning person climbing a mountain with a top you can't reach, pushing a rock maybe, like Sisyphus, or maybe just pushing yourself, hauling yourself up and up and up and already you are sure you have been defeated.That's me sometimes. I don't know if it's ever you, but it is me. It is me when the grades and the papers and the research ideas come back with critique or comment or areas for improvement. It is me in the quiet fights and the loud ones. It is me lying in bed on a random Saturday morning cataloguing the friends I haven't caught up with lately or the places I have not brought peace or the way I should have and could have and would have been a better me.--The economy of God looks nothing like the economy of my anxious heart.The economy of God is God coming towards us, promising abundant generosity for the laborers who work an hour and those who work a full day. It is a strange, terrifying generosity, the kind that makes my neat columns of deserving and undeserving and the weight and sift of my measurements look foolish. The kind that puts us to shame in our race to merit and earn, but rescues us in the midst of it too. God laughs, I imagine, and sets us free.--Once my counselor asked me what the big bad was that would happen if I didn't win. If I didn't get perfect grades or perfect GRE scores or a perfect record of performances. I still don't know the answer to that question. I think that was her point.--I want the economy of God. I want the economy of generosity, the economy of grace. I want the rescue from drowning my way up a mountain I can't ever finish climbing, the setting free. I want the economy that will force me to give up my pride in making each and every thing perfect, my disappointment at myself when things aren't just as I would like them. I want Jesus, in the end, whatever it might cost me and my well-worn anxious heartbeat.And so I do have to figure out three things, write a story that is full of the richness of a generosity I didn't earn, full of receiving blessing where I can't say my goodness or my rightness is the reason, but the only reason is the sufficient reason is that God loves. That's the new story. God loves, and the richness of the story is there. I'm caught up into it, and set free by it, and this is the better story.Preston asked me for three things. I won't tell you what they are, but I'm thinking I might keep a journal somewhere, and start writing them down.And so in a little way, widen my welcome of the most wondrous love.Love,hilary