For most of my life, to be perfectly frank, God has exhausted me. The rule following and the striving to earn the gold stars on the charts in my childhood Sunday School room. It's tiresome. I am a perfectionist rule follower. Growing up in the church became a hot bed for creating rituals and traditions and expectations that bound me up in the endless seeking to do all the right things.

I've grown up "religious." Likely more by my own interpretations and misunderstandings than by direct teaching, it has been a tiresome religion with an occasional fleeting emotional high that I equated to a spiritual high. This led to an endless and rather frenzied search to recreate that emotional response because it became the elusive marker of successful religious living.

My season of carefree childhood came to a crashing halt as I entered my 20's and devastating losses left me reeling. Would this religion of striving hold me up? Could it possibly be all that I supposed it would be? The refining fire and time of testing would prove it, one way or another.

There, I began to shed the faith that I had been handed and began to form my own faith. In the darkest of days, I still ran to God, maybe more out of habit than anything. But the roots of my childhood religion, while shallow, became my holding place. Rote prayers became heart wrenching letters to God, like the honest cries of King David on the hillside, with only his sheep as an audience. I kept my gaze on the God of my upbringing and began to rewrite this thing called faith, carefully considering the traditions handed down from my grandparents and parents and examining them in light of new Biblical understanding.

In the angst of those trying years, I chose to run to the Father God and pound on his chest with my questions and emotions. It was honest and authentic and revolutionary. So, I was quite shocked when an epiphany hit me about eighteen months ago.

I don't really know God. 

Just as I learn new things about my husband after 26 years together, I faced the fact that I don't really know this God that I have served for my entire life. 

Because I have followed him with an obedience that was more for my own benefit than for a genuine motivation for God's glory. I have built my house of faith on shifting sand. I've mixed up my foundation to partly stand on the Rock of Ages and to partly stand on the sand of my own performance and self-righteousness. I've propped up this religion with my own sense of "not being that bad" and convinced myself that it is perfectly reasonable to make demands of God. Doesn't he owe me for being such a good girl? 

It's a bit earth shattering to realize after more than forty years that I've known God on about an inch-deep level because I have been hampered by such great unbelief. I have boxed him in as I've put my trust in self-righteousness. I have given lip service to being saved by faith alone and not works, while mentally applauding all my efforts and contributions.

All my striving ... all my performance based love ... all my pats on the back have blinded me from a true awe of God. My working toward "goodness" instead of holiness has stalled me from exploring the true depths of God.  

I've been exhausted by God and found my "religion" to be so tiresome because I've been missing a true understanding of one key component.

That is the reality of grace.

To experience true freedom in the gospel story and to explore God fully, one must be untethered from striving and earning to led by the light of grace into the depths of who God actually is. 

D.L. Moody undoubtedly experienced this miracle that is grace when he said: