A few months ago, a friend told me about another friend of hers who she thought might like my book. “She’s a good girl like you,” she said.

“Well I’m a recovering good girl now,” I said, wanting to distance myself from that title as much as is possible.

She looked at me, firm smirk, head slightly tilted forward, unblinking. “You’re still a good girl, you know.”

Grace for the Good Girl :: Chapters 17 – 18

Sometimes it hurts, this having you read my journal, this everybody knowing all my junk, my insecurities, my shortcomings, my lessons. It feels risky because as the reader, it feels like you have the advantage. You have the high ground. You can still protect yourself. You can still hide. You can point to the things I wrote in the book and then point at my life and the ways I forget and tell me I haven’t changed a bit.

She’s right, I still struggle with this good girl. I still have dark lies to slay when it comes to knowing how to live free even when you don’t like me, even when it hurts, even when I wreck it all up. I still need to be reminded of the truth, especially when my feelings shout in no uncertain terms that it is time to hide and it is time to hide right now, woman; get your face behind a mask before somebody sees.

You can point to my outside and you might not be impressed.

But the wonder and the miracle is that I am learning how to care less about impressing you. I am changing on the inside and you may never know how much. And the fact that I don’t care if you know how much?

Well that’s a victory all on its own.

And besides, this isn’t about me, anyway. Women ask me all the time – so what now? I know you’re telling us to let go of the try-hard life, but what does that even mean? What am I supposed to do? What does that even look like?

I have an answer for that, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.

Here it is: What will you be doing when you get up from the computer? Because whatever that is?

That’s what it’s gonna look like.

Pulling out the laundry basket, heading up the board meeting, putting on your work shoes, taping up the skinned knees, praying in the darkness, laughing with your lover, seeing how they’re hurting, reaching for a friend.

It looks like life. Boring, normal, spontaneous, busy, hilarious, full, heartbreaking life.

I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you what Jesus said when people asked him that question.

You can read about it in John 6. He had a full day of water-walking, food-multiplying miracles. And the people followed him and begged to know how he did it, what was his secret, how did he make food out of nothing. “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” (John 6:28) They were willing to do it, I think. They were inspired by his miracles and looking for answers. Their hands were open. Their feet were ready. They wanted bread.

And Jesus answered them in their own language and everything. But I imagine the words he spoke were not the ones they expected. ”This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” (John 6:29)

He gave them bread, the kind that lives, the kind who breathes, the kind we can’t really live without.

Do we have the courage believe him for that? The work of belief requires more of us than the work of our hands ever will.

Not just a belief in spirituality or peace or goodness or mercy. Belief in Him whom He has sent.

group discussion

In chapter 18, we read a series of questions you can ask when you find yourself in a situation where your safety seems to be challenged.

• What is the truth?
• What will I choose to believe?
• What will I choose to do?
• Will I give up the right to feel as if the truth is true?

closing thoughts

Thank  you: I know we’ve been kind of quiet in the comments here, but it has been a gift to discuss this book nearly 800 of you on Facebook. Your honesty and insight really does inspire me.

My next book: My next book, Graceful, is for a new generation of good girls. They look different from us, but the root of the struggle is the same. It’s shorter than the first book, completely different layout and content but similar heart. You can pre-order now and it will arrive in your mailbox late August or early September.

Local event: If you are local, I will be speaking at Westover Church in Greensboro, NC next Thursday August 2nd. You don’t have to have read the book to come, but we would love to know if you plan to be there. Just send an email to emily at chatting at the sky dot com and put RSVP in the subject line. Hope to see you there.

It’s hard to read your own book, kind of like hearing your own voice on voicemail – you can’t pay attention to the message because do I really sound like that?! Last night, though, I just sat and read like someone else wrote it.

I cried twice.

And because I’m a person who strongly believes we need to pay attention to what makes us cry, I made note of the exact paragraphs that brought the tears. The first was in chapter 15, at the end of the very true story of how my unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to grieve the loss of that high school relationship caused me to carry around a wound inside for many years.

This is one of the sections in the book that I could hardly write fast enough to keep up with the thoughts. I wasn’t near a computer so I had to settle for a nearby notebook that, if you can believe it, was already filled. So I wrote this broken relationship section in scribbled script on the cardboard backing of this old notebook. This story, of all the stories in the book, is the one that kept me awake at night after I turned in the manuscript. Though it was easy to write, it was hard to make peace with leaving it in a book that would be available wherever books are sold. I think this is why:

“The fact that I needed healing did not mean I was horrible; it meant I was human. We all share a common frailty, but the good girl won’t let me take part. She has both held me back from facing weakness and shoved me forward to fake strong.”

This story highlights my own frail humanity. We don’t get to choose the life situations that weaken our knees. But if we ignore them or deny them, they will eventually find their way to the surface.

The second place I cried was in chapter 16. I think Jane’s story is one of the most important in the book. So many women legitimately struggle with the voice of the good girl in their heads but they discount it because they think they are somehow disqualified from connecting with the good girl struggles because they only identify with their own mistakes.

Many (and I mean many) women have told me they almost didn’t read the book because they always saw themselves as more of a “bad girl” growing up and didn’t think they would connect with the concept of the good girl. I knew that would be one of the downsides of titling the book the way we did. But we all have our things – our heartaches and histories, our grievances and guilts, our loneliness and coping and sin. Jane was as good girl as they come, not because of the decisions she made but because of way she saw God, the world, and herself. And it all needed healing.

Preston Gillham’s words resonate so deeply with me they still bring tears.

“Worry and fear are simply the belief that I have gotten myself into a place where God is not. And so that brings us to the truth, that God, through his determination to share his heart with me, was willing to go to my ungracious place to be with me. He would rather die than live without me, even if it means ungracious places.”

Presten Gillham, Grace in Ungracious Places

One of the reasons I stayed stuck in my good girl confusion for so long is that the territory surrounding me felt overwhelmingly ungracious. The obstacle course of performance and pleasantries was so intricate that the thought of retracing my steps through all of that mess to even get close to where I thought God was standing seemed too impossible. I think Jane felt that way, too.

That’s why Jesus came to us, right where we stood in the midst of the mess, no matter what that mess looks like.

group discussion

The last four chapters of the book focus on the freedom of being found, how we are safe even in the midst of fear, failure, and feelings. The title of chapter 15 is Safe, Even When it Hurts. I was surprised that something as seemingly small as an unresolved high school relationship could follow me around for so long. Can you think of a time when you were unexpectedly forced to confront your own frail humanity? 

One of the good girl’s most basic fears is failure. It takes different shapes and forms and may have varying degrees of consequence, but failure is part of our human condition. Do you recognize your own ungracious places and how is Jesus showing himself to you in the midst of them?

book club information

• We only have one week left, but if you are just now seeing these book club posts, here is where you can get a copy of a book (Amazon, B&N, LifeWay, Family Christian).
• If you have blog, consider writing your own post and hosting discussion with your readers. Link up in the linky below directly to the post you’ve written about this weeks reading, not just to your main blog. We want to make it easy to find your thoughts.

On Thursday August 2nd, I will be at Westover Church at 7pm in Greensboro, NC to share some stories and meet anyone who might be able to make it. I realize most of you live way too far to join us, but if you plan to come, send an email to emily at chatting at the sky dot com. Hope to see you there.

I memorized the first half of Mary’s Magnificat on accident when I was in college. I was in the midst of my short-lived song-writing phase and read the portion in Luke 1 where Mary meets with her cousin Elizabeth. It’s written in verse, and is sometimes called Mary’s Song. Since I obviously didn’t know the tune, I made one up myself and to this day, I can’t read that portion of Luke without hearing the tune in my head.

It isn’t a very good tune, but it doesn’t matter because music helps the words stick. And these words of Mary’s? These words represent one of my favorite images of worship in the Bible.

Living as a good girl, I was always my own point of reference. I was the initiator. I was responsible for action, service, measuring up. If I wrote a book about being a Christian when I was 22, I would have started with chapter 13 – Worship and Service. I thought these were the most important things. Everything started with me. That’s why I was so proud of myself when things went well and so devastated when they didn’t. Because I was my own point of reference.

Mary is the opposite of a good girl. God split her life wide open. If she had been living as her own point of reference, the angel’s appearance would have sent her into a tailspin. But it didn’t. It set her legs to walking and her soul on fire. The Magnificat was her simple, heart-felt response. She responded to the truth that was already in her because God came down.

We are all brilliant, aren’t we? We are big, we are all suns with  rotating earths and planets and star-stuff.

And also, the world is flat. And Al Gore invented the internet.

What a sigh of relief to know, to really know that I am not the center of the universe. To know that every breath, decision, meal, step, and turn is worship if I am doing it with knowledge that He holds all things together. When I forget that truth, when I step back into the center spoke of the wheel? That is when my breathing gets shallow, my head starts to ache, my hands tremble ever so slightly. We are not created to be the center.

group discussion

Chapter 13 highlights the truth that we are a whole people. We cannot diagram our lives into segments, not really. Worship covers the circle, full. Do you struggle with the concept of worship in everything? In what ways are you beginning to see your living as worship?

In Christ, our safety has already been decided. By faith, we believe it to be true. In that case, our greatest enemy is not losing our salvation, trying to become worthy of love, or disappointing God. Our greatest enemy is forgetfulness – forgetting what we already have in Christ. Forgetting that we have been placed into safety because of him. In Chapter 14 we talk about setting our minds on truth. What does this practically look like for you? 

book club information

• We only have two weeks left, but if you are just now seeing these book club posts, here is where you can get a copy of a book (Amazon, B&N, LifeWay, Family Christian).
• If you have blog, consider writing your own post and hosting discussion with your readers. Link up in the linky below directly to the post you’ve written about this weeks reading, not just to your main blog. We want to make it easy to find your thoughts.

Two Weeks Left:

July 19 :: Chapters 15 – 16
July 26 :: Chapters 17 – 18

**Evening Event on August 2nd:: If you are local-ish, we are planning an evening event in Greensboro, North Carolina at the end of our study. If your are close enough to make it live and in person, we’ll be meeting at Westover Church at 7pm on Thursday, August 2nd.

If you are in the US, I hope you enjoyed your fourth! Thanks for hanging in there through five weeks of reading – only three weeks left. This week we read two of my favorite chapters. Am I allowed to say that? 

Learning to let go of the try-hard life feels, in some ways, like an oxymoron. Even though the concept of ‘letting go’ seems carefree and passive, the reality of actually letting go is anything but. Faith often only comes after a fight, after a long road of holding on, after an exhausting last-ditch effort at control. Most of us don’t let go until we’ve tried everything else first.

In the summer of 2000, I sat with my own hopeless confession, my own tired admission that I don’t know how to change. I couldn’t avoid a heartbreaking confrontation with my own fragile humanity. I sat there in that small counseling room of the rented office space right off the highway in Brentwood, Tennessee and waited to hear what my counselor would say to me.

All this mess and all these masks. “I don’t know how not to be this way.” My voice sounded small and defeated. I was embarrassed but too tired to care.

He listened, and then he spoke.

“This may be how you cope … “

…you hide when you get scared, you smile when you get hurt, you serve with a terrible attitude, you do what you don’t want to do, you don’t do what you do want to do, you are a hypocrite, a fake, a liar, and a bad commercial…

” … but this is not who you are.”

This is not who you are.

This is not who you are.

When he said you are a new creation in Christ, Paul wasn’t just giving 2nd grade Sunday school teachers an awesome visual. He wasn’t just providing week-long butterfly curriculum for Vacation Bible School. He didn’t actually mean “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is kind of a new creation, the old is sort of gone (but not really) and the new has pretty much come (except when you feel crummy, and then the old is totally back and the new has no power).”

At salvation, we are straight up new.

Don’t get ahead of me, though. There definitely was something old.

We have to see how bad it is. We have to know the ugly. We have to come face to face with our own deformities, cold-heartedness, apathy, and hatred. See how bad it is! Good girls of the world, admit what you are capable of. Your mask fools no one, not anymore. You are helpless and you are guilty.

But why do we, a people who celebrate a risen Christ, insist upon living like he is still dead? Why do we try hard to pay for our own sin (and expect others to try-hard to pay for their sins against us?) We live with veils over our masks over our painted up faces.

But all of that, as bad as it is, as bad as it was, all of that was taken care of. All of that was killed on the cross. Something new came to take its place. I know there are still remnants. I know we still sin. But sin no longer holds all the aces.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” 2 Cor 4:15

I hear this scares people. They worry that if you go around telling people new things have come, then you might lose control over them (which is exactly the point). They say, “Well, grace is important. But you have to have a balance.”

Really? A balance?

So Jesus left heaven to walk on a balance beam with his arms spread wide out so that we would know what it looks like to perfectly balance grace with the law?

It’s actually even more extreme than that. Jesus says, I’ll see your balance and I’ll raise you mine.

He took the whole law, every bit of it, and met every requirement. Then, he stepped off that balance beam, turned it on its head, put another one across it, and let his accussors nail both his wrists into it.

You want balance?

How about all your wrong in exchange for all his right?

How about you hand him death and he hands you life?

Or is it the other way around?

I will tell you this – I have never been more faithful to read my Bible than since I have discovered this grace. I have never been more sorry for my sin than since I have discovered this grace. I have memorized more scripture in the past year than I have in perhaps my whole life. But it isn’t because I was afraid, pressured, anxious, or self-righteous.

It is because I am free.

It is because Someone took out my balance scales, held all of the law in one hand and all of grace in the other, and offered those hands-filled up to His Father and confessed, “It is finished.”

And so it is.

No more balance, friends. All. Is. Grace.

group discussion

I had an idea of what it meant to be a woman of God (a grown up) and my life was on a steady path in the opposite direction. What are some of your own ideas of what it means to be a woman of God and has this idea shifted at all as you’ve been walking with Christ?

The idea of receiving our identity from Christ and then letting it be true in our lives is easy to say but takes a lifetime to work out. If you really believed that the old is gone and the new has come, in what ways would your life be different? (Would you laugh more? Would you say yes to your kids more often? Would you dare to rest more often? Would you believe in miracles?)

book club information

• Get a copy of the book. It’s never too late to join us. (Amazon, B&N, LifeWay, Family Christian).
• Join the closed Facebook group where discussion is happening as we speak.
• Sign up for the book club if you haven’t already. If you already subscribe to get my monthly newsletter, simply update your preferences to include the book club.
• If you are on Twitter, we’ll use the hashtag #graceforthegoodgirl (unless you can tell me something shorter)
• If you have blog, consider writing your own post and hosting discussion with your readers. Link up to your post in the linky below.

Reading Schedule:

July 12 :: Chapters 13 – 14
July 19 :: Chapters 15 – 16
July 26 :: Chapters 17 – 18

August 2nd:: If you are local-ish, we are planning an evening event in Greensboro, North Carolina at the end of our study. If your are close enough to make it live and in person, we’ll be meeting at Westover Church at 7pm on Thursday, August 2nd.

We are half-way through our discussion of Grace for the Good Girl. This week we’ve only got one chapter. There is just so much to think about at this half-way point, I thought it would be a good chance to take a breath.

I long for the beauty of Eden while surrounded by the shadows of earth. Things were made good, but a lie undid them. There are three things in this chapter that continue to undo me.

1. God put two trees in the Garden. Actually he put more than two, but he pointed out two specifically. He knew what that meant. He knew putting a forbidden tree was a risk, the worst kind of risk. Seeing how things turned out, there is something in me that wants to point back at God and tell him what a bad parent he is. How could you let your children do that!? The Garden God was not a helicopter parent. He did not make his decisions out of fear but out of love.

This is part one of my undoing.

2. Shame and guilt are two different things.  Guilt leads to repentance, shame leads to hiding. When I first began to learn the difference between guilt and shame, it terrified me. Then, it was hilarious. Because living under a cloak of shame is no fun, especially when you think it’s supposed to be there, when you think it’s conviction from God. But learning the difference between these two? That one is from God and the other is most certainly not?

This is part two of my undoing.

3. Hiding isn’t always a bad thing. When I wrote the first half of this book, the part you’ve read so far, I always had in mind where we were headed. Taking off the masks is terrifying if you think you now have to be exposed to a scary world. But coming out of hiding is comforting if you know you are stepping into a new kind of hiding, a true safe place. The Bible says that’s true, says that our lives are now hidden with Christ, in God.

I think about this all the time. Daily.

This is part three of my undoing.

group discussion

There is a lot in chapter 10, content I hope you have had some time to sit with this week. Is there anything we talk about in chapter 10 that has been your undoing? The two trees? The difference between guilt and shame? The gifts of mercy and grace? The new kind of hiding? This chapter is a turning point, a platform from which to launch good news. I would love to take some time on Facebook or here in the comments to hear what you are processing as you read.

book club information

• Get a copy of the book. It’s never too late to join us. (Amazon, B&N, LifeWay, Family Christian).
• Join the closed Facebook group where discussion is happening as we speak.
• Sign up for the book club if you haven’t already. If you already subscribe to get my monthly newsletter, simply update your preferences to include the book club.
• If you are on Twitter, we’ll use the hashtag #graceforthegoodgirl (unless you can tell me something shorter)
• If you have blog, consider writing your own post on Thursdays and hosting discussion with your own readers. Link up to your own blog post in the linky below.

Reading Schedule:

July 5 :: Chapters 11 – 12
July 12 :: Chapters 13 – 14
July 19 :: Chapters 15 – 16
July 26 :: Chapters 17 – 18

Mark Your Calendars :: If you are local-ish, we are planning an evening event in Greensboro, North Carolina at the end of our study, Thursday August 2nd. I’ll have details coming soon, but wanted to whisper a tiny heads up for anyone who is close enough to make it, live and in person.

Welcome to the second week of our loosely organized summer book club/discussion/read-along. Today we’ll be discussing Chapters 4 – 6 of Grace for the Good Girl. You may also wish to join us on Facebook where we’ll continue discussion in a closed group, for those who aren’t comfortable leaving their thoughts in the comments.

if I had it to do over again…

If I had it to do over again, I would have made part one shorter. At the time, I felt I needed a full nine chapters to really unpack the good girl issues, to paint a clear picture of her struggles and give women every opportunity to connect with what might be going on beneath the try-hard, pleasant, strong surface.

Now that I have a couple of years of writing and relating with women on these topics, I wish I had condensed those chapters simply to get to the hope part more quickly. When I outlined the teen book on this same subject, I organized it differently. I’m not sure younger girls would hang with me for long if they didn’t see hope.

So thank you for hanging with me, for doing the hard work of discovery and listening. I hope as you’ve been reading, you haven’t felt too stuck. I made great attempts to weave hope and victory throughout these early chapters, but when you are uncovering some of your hiding ways, it can be hard to see if you aren’t looking for it.

the chapter that isn’t in the book – hiding behind her apologies

One interaction I am not surprised to see during our discussion so far is how many of us apologize for stuff – from being too honest to not reading the chapters on time. It’s actually kind of funny, if you think about it. Put a crowd of good girls in a room (even a Facebook room) and we’re bound to start apologizing for things we feel ashamed of.

In a way, obsessively apologizing is part of the hiding. We sorry our way right out of our own personalities. We apologize for not being fine. We apologize for needing help. We apologize for being emotional, inarticulate, not having answers. Sometimes we even apologize for apologizing.

When guests come over, have you ever heard yourself pointing out the mess to them and apologizing for all the imperfections even though you know that they probably don’t care and it doesn’t really matter?

When the dinner dishes still sit in the sink from dinner two nights ago, do you hear yourself apologize to your husband for it, almost like you want to point out the flaws first before he gets a chance to do it even though he’s not that kind of guy?

I completely accept your flaws but I am strictly opposed to my own. What I’m really saying is, Attention everyone! I have a very important announcement to make – I am a human being and I am ever so sorry about that.

But a true sorry is not about me. Saying sorry is a bad idea when it is used to cover up our beautiful, vulnerable, fragile humanity.

Save the apologies for real wounds, for soul sorrow, for widow grief. Save the apologies for when you really wreck things up and need to seek forgiveness. Save them for when we need to hear it. Otherwise your apology is just an empty space filler, something you are expected to say like, “I’m fine, how are you?”

more on the hiding

I nearly left chapter four out of the book. I wrestled with it, struggled through it, worried that it was coming across like we always have to tell everyone all the time how we feel about stuff. And I don’t think that’s true.

Chapter four would wake me up at night in hot sweats, worried I would be misquoted or misunderstood. You know how much good girls hate that. I wanted to be sensitive to the real problem of women hiding behind I’m fine, how are you? while still recognizing and respecting the fact that there are real, clinical and physical issues that need professional counsel and perspective. And that simply being honest about your emotions isn’t always enough.

We talked about two reasons good girls hide behind their fake fine. The first is fear, because if I’m really honest with you, you might run in the opposite direction. The second is laziness, because sometimes it just takes too much energy to tell you what’s going on. I’d rather just keep to myself because it’s easier and maybe you don’t really want to know, anyway.

Hiding behind fine can be a dark, lonely place to live.

Chapter five is packed full with good girl ways. How I would love to sit in Martha’s kitchen and ask what was going through her head that day when Jesus came for lunch. Martha strikes me as a different kind of good girl than me. It doesn’t seem as though Martha would ever hide behind a mask of fine. When she was un-fine, she was not afraid to say so. I really like that about her.

She and Julia Sugarbaker could have had their own show.

But the other thing about Martha, the part of her I see in myself, is this intrinsic belief that if she didn’t do the work, it would never get done. How much we miss out on when we think we are irreplaceable, when we think we have to hold everything together. What would happen if we dropped all our balls and ran full speed into the arms of God, elbows and legs Phoebe-flailing as we go? That feels like a risk.

The beautiful truth of the gospel is that Jesus took the risk on our behalf. We don’t have to figure out how to let go of all the stuff we’re holding onto because Jesus ran full speed onto the dirty, broken roads of earth. He ran full speed to us. He meets us where we are. He fulfilled the law so we don’t have to.

At the end of chapter six (a chapter so close to my heart it’s hard to put in a tiny blog paragraph), I quote Dudley Hall and I’ll quote him again here:

“When you get miserable enough to die, you can be free. Go ahead and live under the law — give it your best shot. Ultimately the law will make you so miserable, you’ll want to die. Then you will find that someone already died for you.”

He really takes being un-fine to the extreme, doesn’t he? But isn’t that ultimately where we have to go? Jesus goes all the way to the cross and so must we. All this good girl junk? The cross is big enough to handle it. And the life of Christ is powerful enough to overcome.

What if instead of brushing our emotions aside and apologizing for the brokenness, we invited a few people into it? What if instead of pointing out the mess on the floor, we welcomed them to sit with us among it? Perhaps we would finally see that we were made for greater things than this. We are living in the midst of provision, abundance, skill. Giftedness. We were made by design and on purpose by an unapologetic God. Dare to receive His making of you. And don’t forget to say thank you.

group discussion

Because there is so much to discuss with these three chapters, I’ll post a question per chapter and you can either answer all three or the one that resonates the most. I will post the questions on Facebook as well and you can answer them there – it might be easiest to keep the answers all in the same thread so we aren’t hopping around the page.

1. What is your main reason for hiding behind your fake fine? Is it because you are afraid (what will they think of me!), lazy (it takes too much work and I need a nap and a bowl of ice cream), or something else?

2. In what ways do you resonate with Martha’s good girl ways? (see pages 62-64 if you don’t know what I mean)

3. Has your idea of the spiritual disciplines and the purpose of the law shifted in reading chapter six? If so, in what ways?

book club information

• Get a copy of the book. It’s never too late to join us. (Amazon, B&N, LifeWay, Family Christian).
• Join the closed Facebook group where discussion is happening as we speak.
• Sign up for the book club if you haven’t already. If you already subscribe to get my monthly newsletter, simply update your preferences to include the book club.
• If you are on Twitter, we’ll use the hashtag #graceforthegoodgirl (unless you can tell me something shorter)
• If you have blog, consider writing your own post on Thursdays and hosting discussion with your own readers. Link up to your own blog post in the linky below.

Reading Schedule:

June 21 :: Chapters 7 – 9
June 28 :: Chapter 10
July 5 :: Chapters 11 – 12
July 12 :: Chapters 13 – 14
July 19 :: Chapters 15 – 16
July 26 :: Chapters 17 – 18