Why Grace is So Much More Effective than Willpower

Have you ever promised yourself that this time you’re really going to get better at something—only to find yourself right back where you started?

I know that “I should have figured this out by now” feeling all too well.

You make a plan.
You try harder.
You scold yourself for slipping.
Then you start over, determined to finally get it right this time.

Recently, I had a surprising “aha moment” about a small but potentially dangerous habit that I couldn’t seem to self-improve my way out of.

Thanks to that discovery, I’m no longer in danger of burning down the house (literally 😅).

And every day since, I’ve been reminded that grace is not about forcing yourself to try harder—grace is the freedom to try something new.

Watch this ⬇️ short video — or read the quick transcript (keep scrolling)— for a gentle reminder that a weakness is not the same thing as a moral failure.

When I stop relying on my own willpower, a grace-filled redemptive work-around comes into view.

And here’s the deeper truth taking root in our hearts: God never asked us to perfect ourselves.
He simply invites us to receive His perfect love.

Transcript:

Okay, this is about to be “Show and Tell with Cheri”!

When we were in Italy (our kids took us to Italy [in 2018] for our 30th anniversary) I remember looking around our AirBnB going, “I need coffee, and I recognize nothing here!”

So I literally took everything out of the cupboards of the AirBnB that might produce a hot drink, and I sent a picture to my friends Kathi and Susy and Michele. One of them texted back, “Oh, that’s a moka pot” and it looks something like this.

<holds up moka pot>

I literally had to then go on Pinterest to learn how to use it. And for those of you who may not be familiar, it’s actually quite an interesting contraption. You fill this part with water, and then this, I don’t know if you can see, has lots of little holes, and steam goes up. You fill this part with coffee grounds, and then it it has more holes here, and then it has this thing that comes up that’s hollow. The steam comes through the coffee grounds, turns into espresso, basically. There’s holes at the top, and it comes bubbling up. And so you put it on the stove, and you turn it all the way up to high, and you hear it bubble. You hear the water down here boiling, “Bubble, bubble, bubble.” And then you look in and you’re like, “Well, look at all the espresso!”

Okay, recently I went through a phase — I think it was called menopause (“mental pause”) — where I had a bad habit of setting this on the back burner, turning it up to high, and it takes four whole minutes to get done. And it will probably not shock you that I am incapable of standing still or being in the same place for four whole minutes, because that’s a terrible waste of time.

So I would go to do something, but that one thing would lead to another, which would lead to another, which would lead me upstairs. And then I would be like, “Oh no!” because the water would boil dry in here.

One particular time when I came downstairs and I found (this handle is made of plastic) … I found [the handle] on the burner. The whole thing had gotten so hot that the handle had actually melted off and was this close to starting a fire. (I don’t remember the smoke alarm actually went off, or we came really close to it going off…)

Well, here’s the thing: it hasn’t just happened once. It’s happened … how many times? I can’t even count the number of times I leave and come back and I’m like, “Uh-oh…”

It happened again in the last month, and I was like, “Okay, now that I have all of this elder care stuff I’m doing, and they’re claiming to be more independent than they really are, I’m like, “I can’t change them, but I can change myself. I have to take this seriously. I cannot let the warning shots over the bow go unnoticed.”

So I started to do what I’ve always done — two things I’ve always done.

One, I’ve beaten myself up for having such a horrible memory.

And two, I have thought to myself, surely, with all the things I’ve managed to figure out in my life, I can figure this out. I can figure out how to not let this happen anymore. I’m going to make it happen. I’m going to white knuckle it. I’m going to force myself to figure this out, right? I’m going to go from a one to a 10 if it kills me, right? My skill level with with not burning down the house with moka pots is going to … I’m going to do this thing.

So one of the things I did was I bought a bunch of cheap timers. Well, here’s the problem: you want to guess what I do when I hear the sound of an alarm going off? I turn it off, because it’s really annoying. I don’t pay attention to what it was for; I just turn it off. So I have a really “good” skill at turning off alarms — zero skill at actually paying attention to what the alarm was for. 😳

And the number of times that I would be like smelling that this thing is almost about to catch fire. “I thought I set an alarm! Oh, I did!” and I also turned it off with no conscious recall, zero conscious recall. So this plan is not working.

Some time in the last couple of weeks, I was like,

“Cheri, what if you could just accept that this is an area of weakness. That this is not working, and it’s never going to.

What if you could be okay with staying a 1. If you will always be a 1, what would you do differently?”

And the answer was obvious: “I would stop using a moka pot that goes on the stove, because the problem is the stove. The problem is turning on a stove and walking away from it.”

With that freedom, my brain went, “I wonder if they make electric moka pots — kind of like the electric kettle?”

They DO!

But the most important thing … so here’s what it looks like … here’s my beautiful, electric moka pot … and you know what this is? It’s an automatic shut-off.

So when this is done, this has a brain that has a skill level of 10 at Don’t Burn Down the House.

None of this was God convicting me. He was NOT saying, “Cheri, I really, really want you to sacrifice all your time and energy to become a 10 at Not Burning Down Your House with the moka pot.” Like when it’s a moral issue or God is guiding us, we don’t tell these kinds of stories.

But in this particular situation, I didn’t even think about whether there might there be an electric one because I only allowed myself the option of You Must Get Better At This … You Must Shore Up This Area of Weakness.

And so now? It’s a non-issue. Now it’s not a problem. I’ve shifted over to this, and I’m not going to burn down the house anymore.

I want to take that same level of acceptance, that same level of normalizing. … for whatever reason, this is an area where my brain either is broken or never got got formed … and the freedom of accepting those areas and finding the work around feels pretty good.

Carey Lynn

The thing that I have been noticing and learning and trying to become aware of is how much self-judgment there is when I cannot do something that I think I should be able to do, and that has to change. No one else is judging me. I am the one. You know, it’s not the conviction, it’s my own personal standard that God is not even going there. So, so yeah, that’s that’s really important. Thank you for sharing that, Cheri, and for the giggle.

Cheri Gregory 
I love that you said that this the judgment you’re having … that the judgment is not coming from God.

You want to know how much I’ve judged myself about this [old stove-based moka pot] since getting [my new electric moka pot]?

Zero, it is a now, a non-issue. I do not care about this [old stove-based moka pot].

But I cared for years, and so there’s something there as well — about the the freedom … and then the capacity that opens up, right?

We’ve talked about capacity — it’s so important for us as HSPs: how much capacity are we losing, wasting, freezing up when we do the self-judgment over something that’s the equivalent of this stove-based moka pot, when there is a work-around that is safer for us, and we don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s huge.