I Cannot Buy Grace

Many days, I buy a slice of delicious sausage pizza and a Diet Coke. The $6.50 bill is gladly paid as it is, well, delicious. That, and other lunches cost more. That transaction is one of scores I make in any given day or week. “Ya pays yer money and ya gets yer –“ well, whatever. The Cultural Library of Truth, Reddit, says that if your TikTok video gets 1,000,000 hits, you get paid $20.

It is a transactional life. Until it is not.

For the last 45 years I have served this world as an architect. In doing so, I am judged. Often. Publicly. Everyone is judged regardless of whether their work leaves a physical record. In this Internet Time, the judgments and transactions are made instantly, everywhere. And sometimes the decisions of worth are exquisitely personal.

Today, I am being judged three different times. I care deeply about the outcomes, but in truth have no control over them.

The first of my judgments comes via three architects who are looking at 100 other architects’ work (including mine) and judging who is worthy of praise and who is to be ignored. I have completed more than 1,000 projects and won perhaps 50 local and national, 3 of them last year. But here’s the grim math: I have also lost more than 300 competitions. In the desire to validate who I am, I enter all these competitions. But no architect wins every competition, and I lose the vast majority. But I won some, too. Why do I care? I want to determine my worth, because I need others to approve of my outcomes. And so I enter competitions, even though they matter little when I win and hurt when I lose.

With the submissions that lost, the clients still loved their buildings, which were often created through hardships and with extreme devotion from every quarter. Why should this arm’s-length, institutional, impersonal — even opaque — rejection mean anything but frustration at some injustice being inveighed or simple guilt over unwarranted hubris?

Because I — we — live in a transactional world, where we are validated by the grades we receive.

Next up on this judgment day, I am seeing a potential client who will evaluate if I am the right person to help create their home. In making those 1,000 things, I have auditioned for perhaps 3,000 opportunities in 45 years. In the days of print exposure, a single article on my work could generate great interest: One in the New York Times yielded over 600 calls over a full decade of response. Most of these had me visit their site, yielding 40 projects: an amazing result — but also a rejection rate of 90%. Now the internet has meant 25 years of silent rejection, with thousands of visitors a year to my site compared to a few dozen new projects.

And finally, tonight the board of a not for profit will judge whether my work is worthy or flawed — and what to do about it. When the pro bono world allows me to use what God has given me to help those nonprofits who cannot afford me, it is a gift to me from the gift I give to them. But those projects also have a high failure rate. The lack of money for an architect usually correlates to a lack of money to build. So love relationships of shared mission are often crushed in the broken dreams when projects are unbuilt, despite the hope and faith of all concerned.

In a dozen hours these three worlds of possibility can be met with the condemning judgment of my inadequacy. Or the triumph of effort over risk. Despite the obvious inadequacies when these efforts fail, I nonetheless need to attempt these transactions of justification.

With these impending judgments whirling in my head as I drove down the highway, a thought crashed into me amid the silence. For all my grinding efforts, there is something larger than this transactional life.

All effort is met with outcomes — either hoped for or unwanted. But the truth is that no matter the effort, the righteousness, even the truth as we know it, the results of our devotions are always out of our control. We want to pay our money and get our desires. We want transaction. We want control. But control is only a hope, not a recipe.

In the biblical story of Job, God allows Satan to wreck the life of a uniquely guiltless human. Job had paid full retail in life, walking the talk of righteousness and justification, earning the things he had: wealth, children, happiness. But before Jimmy Carter had uttered a word, life as Job knew it was simply wiped away. The complete wrecking of his life completed in a single day.

But when you know that you are given everything, the everything you are given is not owed to you — it is simply the realities of living under the grace of God. Job responds to his disastrous fate with a simple declaration: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” We live lives of expectations to the point of privilege, but we control nothing much beyond expectation.

In the face of the gift of our humanity — unjustified and unearned — the gift of understanding is elusive. And the grace of that is undeniable and hard to accept. Because it has nothing to do with you or me. God has given me — all of us — the abilities to grind and project, to connect and to act; but what I do with that gift is not given to me. “Free will” is not free: The devotions that created the judgments I face today are bought with a cost, the missional basis of my life. But my life is not my own. If it were, I would not die. I would win every award, have grandchildren, weigh 40 pounds less.

We do not earn our gifts. Their entitlement or victimization is simply uncontrollable. How we respond to those gifts uses what God gave us as well: We walk the talk, but God gives us the legs and ears and mind to find our way.