For Good Friday, I thought I would do something a little different, exploring the concept of grace, speaking mainly from the United Methodist perspective, from my experience with anxiety rather than autism.
In Wesleyan tradition, The United Methodist Church remembers John Wesley’s experience of his heart being “strangely warmed” as a sign of grace. I too have felt strange changes in my heart. For me, however, it led to a rushed trip to my doctor for an EKG. This strangeness in my heart was not grace but the first of many panic attacks that followed my first year of seminary. It was a time when I questioned everything I was and every move I made, doubting this calling I had felt so strongly a year prior. In essence, I was being pulled from God by fear and anxiety. While many have heard God’s voice come to them in a whisper at night, my nights were filled only with the voices of my greatest regrets, arguments that I replayed over and over again, and visions of irredeemable potential mistakes. These voices would keep me up for hours until I eventually drifted off from exhaustion.
For me, grace was not a “heart strangely warmed. However, even filled with constant fear, I experienced grace. Grace came in the calls to my mom where she would sit and breathe with me until the world stopped spinning. Grace came in the post-EKG recommendation to seek out a neuropsychological evaluator and grace came when I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder. Anxiety itself isn’t a form of grace but the diagnosis came on the wings of the Spirit, providing a name and an explanation for what I was experiencing and a path forward from this state of fear and exhaustion. I was able to receive medication and, instead of coming as a voice in the nighttime, grace came in the first silent night where I could sleep without all of the voices in my head.
The type of grace that John Wesley experienced is one that transformed his path in a way that guided him back to God, freeing him from the power of sin that had distracted him from God’s plan. I don’t see anxiety as a sin but rather an unfortunate biochemical imbalance that causes undue stress. Yet, the pain it caused did pull me away from God. The doctor and the therapist and the medication and my mom were there as vehicles of grace to help clear the path back to God’s calling. I still have anxiety and there are still times that come up where I catastrophize over minor missteps or fall down rabbit holes of disastrous possibilities. God’s grace doesn’t exist to “fix” me or my brain. Yet, through it all, I still experience grace through the people and resources God has placed in my life.
These experiences of grace are not experiences that John Wesley would have foretold and they are experiences that the church often has difficulty recognizing. However, as we learn and grow as a diverse community of believers, we’re able to learn that grace comes in as much variety as we do. By reframing the Wesleyan understanding of grace to account for new testimonies towards the eternal Spirit, I believe that we can create a United Methodist Church that recognizes grace in all God’s children.
Comments