I’ve been doing some study of late in the area of salvation through grace versus salvation through works, or righteousness if you will. This may mean nothing to you, and if so, that’s fine. Please keep reading. I’m not going to try to wade into the heady waters of soteriological philosophy in a five minute read. The summary is in the question: do you believe that you are fully embraced because you exist or do you believe that you need to do something to prove yourself worthy of being fully embraced?

I’m in the former camp. This does not mean that I think everything we do is good, or right, or acceptable. It does mean that I believe we have infinite capacity to try again and there is an endless well of divine love encouraging us.

There are a lot of people in the world who profess to believe what I believe. In fact if you are part of the reformed Christian tradition in any denomination this is supposed to be the foundation of what you believe. Now we have gummed it up pretty well in a lot of places and in a lot of ways but one of the really big points of the Reformation was to say, ‘you are loved because you exist; you do not have to and in fact cannot buy your way into heaven because it is already freely available to you.’ And yet, it feels to me like we are all running around doing everything we can to prove our worthiness, to someone, maybe to ourselves? Certainly to each other. Given that a lot of people claim to not believe in God anymore we aren’t necessarily trying to prove anything to God. But man alone are we ever trying to get recognized for being good, better, the best.

I have a bunch of apps on my phone that all want me to commit to getting or maintaining a streak for doing whatever the app is about. I don’t think these app developers actually care about me as a person and are doing this to help support me in building healthy habits, maybe that is cynical, and I do enough work with folks in behavior modification to know that if you want something to stick you have to make a regular act of it, but… But… You also sell more, get more, gain more if you have more users. And we know our brains like rewards, even if those rewards don’t actually mean anything. We also don’t like to be shamed, we want to please people, we want to feel like we are doing good, we want to be approved of.

So as I have been shamed by an owl for the last week, I have been wondering for myself about who exactly I am doing this for, what it is that I want to get from it, and on a larger scale how many systems we have in place, how many “games” we are playing that are telling us the exact opposite of what is cosmically true, and the way that might be breaking apart our ability to connect to the divine love that wants to tell us how loved we already are. I’m just wondering what the impact is if I spend hours every week doing things that are theoretically good for me but that involve an element of demanding judgment. In what way do I subtly train myself to believe that goodness is based on performance, work, keeping my streak, rising to the next level?

I changed the settings on a lot of things today. Some I am doing and I need the nudge, I like the rhythm of the reminders to pause and reflect. Some I needed to remind myself that what I am doing, how I am showing up, who I am, how I am, is enough. Even something little like an owl telling you it’s disappointed, it won’t save your streak forever, it wants you to try harder, even something silly and little like that, I fear can make you think that if you don’t do enough in the right way, well then you aren’t enough to be in the ‘God loves you league.’ And that’s just not true.

Yes we need to do good, we need to treat each other with loving kindness, and it is bad if we don’t do that. But we are not bad, we are always good, we always have the capacity for good. We need to change the settings and remind ourselves each day that we have that capacity for expansive loving, even if it is just a little, just enough in this moment.