I was born a rule-follower, a people-pleaser, a peace-maker and a peace-keeper.  

I was the girl who went to school on her deathbed because I so deeply desired the perfect attendance award.  I was the girl who came home in a heaving puddle of tears the one day of elementary school I got a mark on my behavior chart.  

The consummate good girl, I never had to work particularly hard to be that person - it just was who I was. Things always felt comfortable, right, and most importantly - good - inside the perimeters I was given, so I rarely struggled against them.  

People seemed to appreciate this.  In fact, that one compliment became the refrain of my childhood years, “Summer, you are such a good girl.”  The compliment was always given with a nod of approval.  I was the girl no one had to worry about, because I always did exactly what I was supposed to do.  It seemed I was able to rely on my own standard of goodness and ability to be good, in order to uphold that standard.  

Until the day I discovered I couldn’t.  

That day became a defining moment in my life; the day I came face to face with the limit of my own effort, strength, and goodness.  It laid to waste everything I thought I knew about myself. My center of gravity shifted violently. I was left reeling.   

I recognize now that the core of my struggle came down to this: I didn’t want to need the grace Jesus came to offer.

I had set up my entire life in such a way that I rarely needed grace from anybody.  So quite frankly, I despised the fact that I needed it now. My need for Jesus’ grace was a massive, red, flashing sign that pointed straight to the moment of my greatest weakness, my worst regret, and my deepest shame. I was sure that type of exposure would completely unravel me.  So instead of turning toward His grace, I turned away from it. 

I intently focused all my efforts on getting back to being good. On doing the next right thing and then the next right thing after that. For years. It was a furious, hamster-wheel of futility as I struggled to find freedom, by putting on all the right behaviors and making all the right moves.  

As my relationship with Christ has progressed, I’ve come to understand that it was never going to be about what I could have done for Him in my goodness, but about what He did for me in the midst of my sin.  

You see, it’s not our triumphs that bind us to him, but our transgressions - not our fortitude, but our failures - not our perfection, but our poverty.  His grace covers it all.

The grace I initially so despised was the very thing which brought me to Him.  The sin I believed would damn me, became the means through which God would save me.

This story is not mine alone.  It fills the pages of Scripture.

In John Chapter 4, Jesus goes out of His way to cross paths with a woman who needed the salvation He came to offer.  She knew the world was a broken, fallen place and she tumbled, head-first, into her busted-up place within it.  Her life was messy - reckless even.  She knew she had been irreparably marked by the sin that littered her past and spilled incessantly into her present.  Jesus intersected this woman right where He found her.  He wouldn’t ignore her sin or the fact that she was so crippled by it, she could barely stand up straight.  No, Jesus made a nose-dive straight into the heart of her biggest fear; He would see her for who she really was.  

She and Jesus go back and forth for many verses in John Chapter 4.  She ducks and weaves her way through the conversation.  He refuses to relent. Jesus’ message is clear; “I know who you are, I know everything you’ve ever done, and I still desire that you be mine.”  Her worst fear and greatest hope collide in a moment that changes everything. 

Something about this woman’s encounter with Jesus that day changed the trajectory of her life.  Something about His presence freed her from her tangled-up existence.  Wearing her new-found freedom like a badge, she ran into town, professing her sin in the streets.  “Come!”, she proclaimed.  “See a man who told me everything I ever did!”

I used to be confounded by the thought of this woman's public confession.  I couldn't fathom a presence so potent that it could obliterate the shame of my past; certainly not to the point where I would publicly display it. The slow realization I’ve come to though, is the woman from Samaria wasn’t proclaiming her sin; she was proclaiming the one who freed her from it.  

Likewise, the point of my story isn’t my sin, but my Savior.  Over the course of these many years that I’ve followed hard after my Savior, there’s been something about the way he’s refused to relent in his love for me that cuts straight through my instinct to hide.  Instead, it beckons me to that same place He led the Samaritan woman, proclaiming, “Come!  See a man who told me everything I ever did.” 

in His name,

Summer