grace | Cookie Cawthon | product of a tenacious grace

April

Me too.

I tried to call someone on my calculator this week.

The call could not be completed as dialed. In case you were wondering.

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I spend a lot of time considering what women need to survive and thrive. It’s a fluid endeavor because we’re a mysterious crowd and quite responsive to our context. As the climate around us changes, what we need to flourish in it also shifts.

Take social media, for instance. It has undeniably changed the landscape of association and interaction. How do we handle the bombardment of opinions and images of hundreds of people in a healthy way when our insides are so given to comparison and insecurity?

Consider the barrage of discord and violence we’ve invited into our hearts and brains when their nurturing nature is bent towards worry and fear. What does it take to bloom bravely in a garden of bad news?

Amid a national epidemic of high profile sexual harassment and abuse scandals, how do we retain our sense of value when it is often so tied to how others treat us? How do we assimilate the entrenched victimization of women, as revealed by the #MeToo movement, without accepting the jaded, angry heart pervasive abuse conjures?

In a body-obsessed culture, how do we make peace with our genetics without swinging into unhealthy territory on either end of the spectrum?

In the age of accessibility, where we can be reached by text, email, call, LinkedIn, Facebook, GroupMe, Instagram, Snapchat, and FaceTime (not our calculators yet), how do we protect a quiet that is vital to our peace? How do we maintain ownership over our time and thoughts when our devices have given them away to everyone?

Sometimes I pause to realize I’m disappointed with the whole world. All of it. All of its trinkets and corners. And, consequently, that makes me sullen and skeptical and guarded and pointy. Then, in the next breath, I recognize I am the common denominator in that 360° blast of disillusionment. I have to fight for my own heart and perspective. I am in a battle to retain the gentleness and hope, constancy and faith our society wars against. You are too.

What does it take to bloom bravely in a garden of bad news?

It requires counterintuitive honesty. More than just about anything, we want to hear, “You are not in this woman thing alone.” We want to know we aren’t the only ones dialing whole phone numbers on the calculator app on our phones.

We want to know that you yell at your kids, that you don’t wash your sheets as often as you think you should, that you are pasting a smile over a hurt you don’t know how to fix. Not because it’s any of our business……it’s not, but because it cheers us on in our own struggles, freeing both of us from fake rules about how to be women.

#MeToo is a primal collective cry against sexual violence (thank God!), but we want to hear it in other arenas as well.

You are panic-stricken over the safety of your children at school? Me too.

You take medication for anxiety and depression and can’t function without it? I have too.

You have a gaping, silent hurt that you ignore until an innocuous trigger causes it to boil over into your day; I have known that life.

You continue in a busyness that is shredding your soul even though you know you can’t go on like that indefinitely? Me too.

You bully yourself with a refrain of not enough…not pretty enough, not strong enough, not good enough. I’ve done that too.

Sometimes you rely on coffee more than you do God. Same.

You self-medicate with This Is Us and ice cream; we are connected souls.

You lie awake at night thinking every twinge indicates cancer? Me too.

You hate how your legs look in shorts? Ditto, friend. All of it…..

Me too.

It requires living beyond ourselves. In a world decorated with drivel, the antidote is purpose. Without intentionality, it’s easy to allow the world to paint our days with noise. A steady diet of which leaves us feeling hollowed out. Empty. An inner yuck similar to the physical aftermath of an over-indulgence of fried food. Ick. There is something in us that has to believe there is more to life than self-driving cars, instant pots, Matcha, and Whole 30.

We have an innate desire to be a part of something larger than ourselves, a work that will outlive us. There is a substance-hungry drive in us that must plug in to a giant good. This satiates something timeless in us while feeding hope and optimism (I know of an organization working to help formerly incarcerated women write new stories upon release, if you’re interested ;-).

It requires a recalcitrant faith. We are in constant sensory overload. All of the messaging and imagery screams, “Seeing is believing.” But the words in the messages and the stories in the images aren’t necessarily true. Today necessitates a critical eye for truth and a shrewdness for detecting the false. The need for definitive Truth has never been greater, and from it we boldly assert, “What I believe informs what I see. Believing is seeing.”

Circumstances say, “Look at her mug shot, the list of her charges, the number of times she’s been arrested. It’s an age-old cycle impossible to break.” Seeing is believing.

Grace says, “I was lost but now I’m not. I see my own story in her eyes. Me too, sister.” Believing is seeing.

This is not a sissy faith. It is a tender revolution of belief.

Want to bloom bravely in a garden of bad news?

Ditto, friend. Me too.

July

Revealing the Gritty, Grubby, Unpopular Truth about Grace You Need to Know Now

woman by shore

I’ve been in one fight in my life. In college. A friend was encircled by several, on the ground in the dark receiving blows. Hurting, outnumbered people evoke a primal reaction in me.

May I be so honest as to admit – besides the defense of my children – nothing incites a fight in me like arrogant smugness towards someone else’s pain.

My spirit animal is a bantam rooster.

bantam rooster

With that being said, I try to stay out of fist fights these days. You know, they’re not so fashionable on the forty-three year old wife, mom, Jesus-lover scene.

I try to fight smarter instead. With words. Not angry ones but healing ones. Under the banner of love, understanding, and grace.

And I find that grace is a widely misunderstood concept. You see, it doesn’t own a set of dress clothes. That’s why we don’t often see it in our churches. It’s not hipster or preppy. It doesn’t own a cardigan and can’t afford Starbucks.

It’s bloody. Dirty. It has mud under its fingernails and scraped knees and elbows. At its inception, its back was sliced to ribbons and its temple stabbed by thorns.

We don’t recognize it because it’s unlikely to cross its legs on a pew or cushioned seat. It inhabits ditches and cells and tear-soaked pillows and shattered hearts.

Have you seen it?

There came a point in my life when God loved me too much to allow me to continue in haughty self-righteousness. That’s a painful correction, friends. A trip behind the woodshed that I don’t recommend. When I tell you I have a healthy fear of the Lord, you can know it is because I know his discipline.

And his grace. His beautiful, expensive, muddy, bloody grace.

This is what He taught me…

Grace is not weak or timid.

Grace isn’t passive. It is a wise restraint, a love, a compassion fueled by an awareness of one’s own depravity and the generosity of God.

The only requirement for grace is that it is undeserved.

If grace were ever deserved it would be a reward not a gift. For instance, people who withhold grace infuriate me. Self-righteousness is the offense Jesus spoke most harshly against. BUT. The character of grace means I must extend grace to those who withhold it, or I am indicted for the very same thing I accuse them of. Grace must always be circular and lavish and unwarranted.

The grace we fail to extend today may be the grace we need extended to us tomorrow.

There is a just economy to the administration of grace. I don’t recommend taking the field trip to learn this one.

Grace doesn’t mean there are no consequences for sin.

But it does mean correction doused in love, compassion, and forgiveness. God uses consequences to change us, not to punish us. Transformation is always the goal. And if we are meting out consequences for poor choices that should be our motive as well. You get this parents……we dole out extra chores or restrictions to teach our children a lesson or to prompt a change in attitude or behavior. Scrubbing baseboards as the highway to a kinder disposition towards an annoying little brother.

Christians need grace. A LOT.

We can think we needed grace when we were scalawag heathens and that we are holy givers of grace after conversion. That would be true if the process of our perfection happened instantly. Unfortunately, your route and my route to perfection may include a ditch or two. They’re brimming with spiritual value.

From The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning, a former Franciscan priest turned vagabond evangelist…

There is a myth flourishing in the church today that has caused incalculable harm: once converted, fully converted. In other words, once I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, an irreversible, sinless future beckons. Discipleship will be an untarnished success story; life will be an unbroken upward spiral toward holiness. Tell that to poor Peter who, after three times professing his love for Jesus on the beach and after receiving the fullness of the Spirit at Pentecost, was still jealous of Paul’s apostolic success.

Often I have been asked, ‘Brennan, how is it possible that you became an alcoholic after you got saved?’ It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure; because I got discouraged, uncertain, guilt-ridden and took my eyes off Jesus. Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel. Because justification by grace through faith means I have been set in right relationship with God, not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table.

I am the worst of sinners. And so are you.

If we want a sin scale, the only accurate and biblical truth is to recognize, like Paul, that we are the worst. The safest and truest posture towards sin is acknowledging that we are capable of committing every single one.

We can’t fully grasp grace until we have needed it more than air to breathe.

Trust me, a girl doesn’t name her ministry Tenacious Grace because it has a nice ring to it. There is a depth to God’s grace that can only be experienced when lapping it out of beggarish desperation.

Grace is expensive.

Jesus died to broker grace. We are not to cheapen it with quibbling hesitance. Being a purveyor of grace will be costly. It may require a sacrifice of indignation on our parts. It may hurt to extend grace. That is consistent with how it was purchased.

Your opinions/feelings, my opinions/feelings have no bearing on grace.

Grace is not optional or selective. It cannot be. To make it such is to mar his sacrifice with our bloated self-worship.

God won’t stop until we have been changed by his grace.

God is ever wooing us with his grace. He initiates daily encounters with his beautiful, expensive, muddy, bloody grace.

Daily brushes with his tenacious grace.

[Rooster Image: Marji Beach]

February

If I Were Homeless…

homeless

I do this thing where I search for places to sleep if I were homeless. My children are less disturbed than when I initially began sharing “If I were homeless…” plots. Last week I ran under an overpass and caught myself inspecting its potential for shelter from the rain and cold.

This preoccupation with my own imagined homelessness began when I was driving a minor road in a shopping area of town. The road was bordered by a dense swath of trees, thick with foliage and brush. I peered in, hoping to be treated to some trinket of nature. A woodpecker. A lone wildflower. A cautious rabbit.

Instead I saw a tent.

My mind clothes-pinned the image to my consciousness. Who lives there? Where did he get the tent? Why is he homeless? But, more than anything, I was moved by his choice of location. These were woods in the heart of our commercial district, hemmed in by the interstate. Maybe he thought the site insured people nearby and was too urban for animals of a ferocious bent. That would have been my line of thought too. Something about that fabrication left me feeling connected to the unseen inhabitant of that khaki canvas.

Now I sometimes imagine what I would look like a month unshowered. I see dirt caked under my nails and my long, thick hair heavy with oil. I run my tongue across my teeth, hairy with a warm film of bacteria, coated by the thick saliva of dehydration. I take the rancid stench of a hard run and multiply it by thirty and apply it to me and my brownish clothes baggy with constant wear.

And I imagine what that would do to me.

Interestingly, I am always homeless alone. My imagination cannot allow homeless children…

homeless mom

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I sit across from a female inmate, and her story is heavy with us. Even though I don’t know it. I don’t ask. We are both aware of its effect, even if the specifics remain unnamed.

To be honest, I don’t ask because I am afraid that knowing will break me.

So we live in that hour. That present. Where all I know to do is smile and hug and love and encourage and share Truth and hope and most of all Jesus. And many of them smile and hug and love and encourage back which makes it amazing grace.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be born to a young mama addicted to heroin.

Or to have her boyfriend amuse himself by holding lit cigarettes to my tender skin.

To have no memory of ever being pure.

To awaken to gunshots.

To grow up with a hollowed out soul.

And I imagine what that would do to me.

meth addict

—————

“Why NOT me?”

I did nothing to deserve the advantage of my birth. Of my circumstances.

Nothing.

Sometimes I think we congratulate ourselves on living a wholesome middle-class life. But, really, to what credit is that to us?

Bless us, we’ll call having basic cable a deprivation and consignment shopping a brush with humility.

I’m not trying to bang the guilt drum; I’m really not. And if I were, I’d be the greatest offender.

But there is something I’m after.

Can we all acknowledge that a high school diploma in one child’s life, given his circumstances, may be a greater achievement than three college degrees earned by a child of affluence?
Can we grasp that the child whose only meals happen at school may not legitimately care about the order of operations in math class?
Can we understand that children who grow up with addict parents may not exhibit the same behavior we deem acceptable?

We are not all born into equal circumstances.

We don’t all have the same chance for success.

But the playing field of grace should be level, Church. Disparity has no place here.

We know little of fighting for a future.

But the pathway of judgment and complacency is well-worn.

We want our homeless people clean and happy, educated and with nice manners. We want children without functioning parents to know appropriate behavior and how to make responsible choices. We want people who live in abject poverty to see the value of working a minimum wage job instead of turning a quick trick or sale. Honesty doesn’t always feed a growling stomach or put shoes on a little boy’s feet.

If we can’t give anything, we can give grace.

I am not making excuses. I think crimes should be punished. I don’t have the answers. But I believe God is clear about His heart here, and it involves a lot of love and a lot of compassion and a lot of help. And it begins when we unzip the insulation of privilege around our own hearts…

For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’

“Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

“And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’ – Matthew 25:35-40

…and dispense a lot of grace.

A dogged, tenacious grace.

[Images: Karim Corban, Wayne S. Grazio, Thomas Hawk]

July

The House That Regret Built

rearview mirror

I know what I want to be when I grow up.

After burning through four college majors, two college degrees, teaching high school English for seven years, momming it at home for ten years, working on church staff for three years and traipsing around the planet for forty-two years, I finally know.

And the thing is….I vividly remember bumping up against what stirred my soul on several occasions along the way.

In the early years of my adolescence I wanted to be a missionary. I was born with a teacher’s heart, so during that span of life, I “practiced” the missionary life by teaching my sister about Jesus. Heather is ten years younger, so I would sit her three year-old little self in my lap and read her endless Bible stories. Asking her questions to check her comprehension as any teacher worth her salt knows to do.

I again rubbed elbows with my heart’s love at the end of a bar in Clemson shortly after my college graduation. With a degree in Secondary Education. Deep in conversation about what I wanted to do next, I stifled tears when I shared my desire to search out the poorest community I could find and enact change through quality education. With a grand finale flourish, I released the tears and concluded, “I think I may be a Democrat.” True story. I didn’t know what to call the fire in my belly. I didn’t have a label for it.

My trip to Kenya in 2009 once again inflamed this thing in me. It felt like all my senses were on high alert. Colors were more vibrant, smells richer, flavors deeper. I felt all wide-eyed and alive.

And then. My recent trips to visit with the female inmates in the Florence County Detention Center sealed the deal. The thing was back. And this time I knew what to call it. And it isn’t at all tied to a political party.

Fear and doubt in the form of…

You can’t go live in a foreign country by yourself.

It wouldn’t be safe for you to work in a low-income community as a young teacher.

What are you going to do? Sell all of your belongings and feel sorry you were born in America? How does that help Kenyans?

…caused me to reject the stirring. My own preoccupation with safety and certainty has stolen years.

I regret that. It makes me sad to only now walk with clarity of purpose. It took decades to get here, and time is short. There is so much to do…..

There are other things I regret too.

But here’s what I know about regret. It builds a house and invites us to dinner. It rolls out a lavish spread and makes it easy for us to accept its hospitality. Regret says, “Put your feet up. Rest. Cry if you want to; your tears are welcome here.” And all the while it coaxes us into paralysis. Until our faith atrophies. Our hope feels like concrete blocks. We are smothered by the oppressive blanket of the past. We’re a guest at the inn of shame where no sunshine angles through the window. It’s dim. And we’re stuck.

house

That’s the house regret has built in my life. Does that ring true with your experience at all? Is that your current address?

Well, here’s what else I’ve learned about regret. If we’ll intentionally muster the persistent effort to leave out the back door, we’ll find ourselves standing in the sunshine on the front porch of opportunity.

Because we can’t change the weight of the past.

But we don’t have to continue to sit under it.

God has provided informed hindsight where He’s allowed me to look in the rearview mirror and see how essential every part of my journey has been to our current location. Experiences from my childhood taught me Jesus is the source of healing and helped me connect with others who have similar backgrounds.

My early love for disciple-making and the years of studying educational theory and practice as a college student work nicely together.

My years on a church staff taught me how to lead a ministry, how to lead people and build teams. How to engage people with the Truth and the pure joy of serving others.

My mistakes have baptized me in an understanding of grace that I desperately needed, and they have broken the legs of pride that attempted to stand too tall. Because sometimes the Lord’s goodness tastes like humble pie.

While He has worked good from everything in my life for His purposes, He has said as He did after the miracle of feeding the five thousand in John 6, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted” (v. 12).

Let nothing be wasted.

I look back and know that every part of it was necessary. Though I could have chosen to learn lessons in less painful ways.

Today, as I stand in the sunshine on the front porch of opportunity, I am not alone. There are two friends with me, Kay Douglas (the business/legal guru) and Lindsay Haselden (the creative/marketing brain), and we peek in the window and see a ministry called Tenacious Grace. God has knit us together with a submission to Him, a love for each other, and a passion for seeing people thrive in their relationship with Jesus. I am particularly broken for poor, marginalized, hurting women.

friends.

We don’t know all of the specifics, but we know that Tenacious Grace is a place where people can find Truth, strength, and hope in Jesus. Through speaking and writing and serving in jail and whatever other directive the Lord gives, we intend to point to Jesus, champion grace, and serve women who haven’t enjoyed the advantages of life we have.

We have a tiny office and bills. We are in the process of filing for 501c3 (nonprofit) status, and next month we’re filming a six-week video-driven Bible study, which will be our first major project.

If you are interested in watching and participating in what God is doing through the ministry of Tenacious Grace, like our ministry page on FB, subscribe to the blog, and share posts to help us reach outside of our circles of influence. There will be lots of opportunities to get involved, and we would love to have you on board.

As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll stop by again real soon.

[Feature Images: Miguel Angel Arroyo Ortega and Max and Dee Bernt]