Grace is something you drink straight.
No ice, no orange juice to follow up. No Gatorade. Nothing.
Consider your last shot of whiskey. It starts in the nose, burning and clearing your sinuses. Then the nerves in your lips catch their first splash, readying your body for the oncoming wave of sensations. The tongue, with all its fires, snuffed out. And the taste of cinnamon adds its signature burn to your palette.
Maybe you roll it onto the roof of your mouth and…
Suddenly, in one motion, it goes straight down your body, gravity pulling it down to your stomach. You feel a certain unrest for a moment. You wonder for a second if it’s coming back out. But no. It settles. And from that inner place, the alcohol breaks down into your system, into your bloodstream.
You reach for your orange juice, because you aren’t in college anymore and you are employed now, perhaps married. Your tolerance isn’t what it used to be.
And then the funniest thing happens. Things become lighter around you. The voices that typically follow you all seem to sit on the park bench and have a cigarette.
And all of a sudden, joy emerges. An inexplicable careless, selfless love and gratefulness for the people around you creeps its way into your perceptions. So does the sentimental melancholy you felt in the background of your life emerge to the foreground. But with its seriousness and weight, a simple appreciation for life also does. You can’t shake it. Only time and black coffee can. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.
Meanwhile, your body is trying to break down poison. It literally cannot handle alcohol, so it breaks it down into joy.
Okay, so there’s my attempt at making alcohol sound as appealing as possible. Don’t invite me to the AA meeting, I’d be supremely unhelpful.
But why are people addicted to it? It’s not that alcohol is bad, but that it’s good, and it works very well. Alcohol is not the problem, it’s the solution to problems, however maladaptive. It takes those voices away, it brings levity to the heart, it shrugs off burdens like dead weight.
And we have a lot to learn from it. Jesus made wine, and He made it after everyone was drunk. Did He make it with the reservation that it was only for the people who hadn’t drunk that night, so they wouldn’t get drunk? Or did He make it for everyone? Oh, and it was the best wine no less. He didn’t dilute it; He literally strengthened its alcohol content. The Great Bartender.
I won’t go into how wine was stronger back then. It was diluted but it was strong. My point is that God isn’t up there shaking His fist at alcohol. He made that poison for us.
Why would God make something that our body cannot break down easily? Something with such a mind-altering effect? And then come down to earth in Jesus, and make more of it, for a party of drunk people? Did He make it so He can turn around and condemn us for drinking it? Makes no sense if you ask me.
I feel no need to put up all the caution tape necessary for this subject, we’re all adults here. If you have a drinking problem, it will destroy your life.
But what I am saying is that there is a reason God created alcohol. Because it’s the best analogy for His Grace that the world has.
Consider your last shot of Grace instead. Similar experience. Lights up all the senses. The nose is cleared with its glory. It enters the nerves of your lips, making its way to your tongue, extinguishing its many fires. Then gravity takes it to the core of your being. Not easily digested by the body, it sits there and enters your bloodstream. Your blood takes its effect everywhere else.
And then the funniest thing happens. Inexplicably, things become lighter around you. The voices that typically follow you all seem to sit on the park bench and have a cigarette, choking and dying on their inhalations.
And all of the sudden, a joy emerges. A careless, selfless love and gratefulness for the people around you creeps its way into your perceptions. So does the sentimental melancholy you felt in the background of your life emerge to the foreground. But with its seriousness and weight, a simple appreciation for life also does. You can’t shake it. You shed a tear, maybe the first one this year. You marvel at its power. How such a small amount of liquid can have such a tremendous effect on all of your being.
Perhaps you experienced this at salvation. Perhaps God wrecked your life this way like He wrecked mine. Or perhaps you felt it in the beauty of a newborn child. Some people have the tears of grace roll down their faces with the whispered sayings of loyal lovers.
And then you go to church. And then you read your Bible. And suddenly, the pastor, nay, even the Writer of the Good Book has taken all of that away. You are spiritually hungover. All at once, it feels like all that grace really was merely a poison, a momentary high that has terrible ramifications. You can’t shake it. Only time and black coffee can. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.
To speak in practical terms, you came to God drunk on Grace - out of excitement for His goodness, compassion, and forgiveness and four months later, you’re coming to God to cure your spiritual hangover.
Your prayers are just kneeling on a hardwood floor and asking Him to rid you of the guilt of your sin. They aren’t fun anymore. They have lost the lightheartedness. They have lost the spiritual drunkenness they once had. We convince ourselves that to drink more Grace at this point, at this level in your walk with Christ, would be to indulge in poison.
Another way to say this, is “cheap grace”, as many have called it. It’s the idea that God woos you in with His grace so that He can hit you with the terms and conditions later. I knew a pastor who would say that “salvation is the free gift that costs you everything”.
No fun. We used to party with the strong drink of God’s Grace, now all we have is chasers. The empty calories of some Walmart-brand cranberry juice.
How interesting. We now find ourselves in a position where our joy is taken by the least likely culprits – church, pastors, the Bible.
By this I mean that we are scared out of drinking Grace. I guess defining what I mean by grace is important at this point. I see it as God’s unmerited favor. The infinite, other-worldly compassion that He has for you every second of every day. The forgiveness available before your prayers leave your mouth.
But what happens when you read the Bible? How about all those people getting their heads chopped off for what they’ve done to upset God? How about the Second Coming? Is there not a part of God that open-secretly wants to kill humans?
How about those sermons? How about the one where you’re supposed to submit to your husband? How about where you’re supposed to die to yourself, die for your wife? Or crucify your flesh?
In other words, What about accountability? Can there be a relationship without terms and conditions? I certainly have some terms and conditions. For example, if you are actively trying to kill me, I’m not going to be one of your better friends. I also usually demand you treat me with respect. I very much prefer it if you like me too.
But speaking from experience, I don’t have a list. Like really. I never actually wrote down what it takes to be my friend anywhere. I know women who write down lists for what they need a man to be for them to consider them long-term. I don’t have one of those for women. But I digress.
But without terms and conditions, without a law, how is it possible for me to have friends? And further, if I don’t have my buddy’s list, how is it possible that he’s my friend? Now that I think about it, at times, my friends have disobeyed what would be on my list if I had one, and somehow, they’re still my friends.
How? We don’t have to read the terms and conditions. Because there is something that has a higher standing over our negotiated friendship. And that’s that I like some people. And the more potent my heart is with that substance – the substance that makes me like people - the more I start to like them.
It manifests in very odd ways. I take genuine interest in their lives. I listen to them when they are speaking. I actively position myself so that my life and my words can bless them, even when that is at a cost to myself. It flows freely. It makes me start to question if it’s even best described as a sacrifice anymore.
No. It’s not sacrifice.
It’s joy. It’s…
Intoxication.
It’s Grace, no chaser.
Why do people change? That change that happens when an alcoholic puts the bottle down for good? The change that happens when a husband stops hitting his wife? That change that happens when a man stops smoking cigarettes?
The man has changed because he started drinking something else. He’s drinking the spiritual moonshine of grace: love. The Surgeon General can slap a thousand labels on his bottle of whiskey, but the only thing that really moves him is watching his daughter hide from him when he gets home. Watching his wife enter terror when there is the slightest disagreement and wondering what Love would have to say about this. It’s love for those he loves that changed the man.
Meanwhile, as a church, we’re going around and trying to beat people into compliance. God and the Scriptures flatly disagree with this approach. And if it sounds like Scripture is teaching anything otherwise, it’s merely the terror we have of our abusers putting on shattered glasses for us to read with.
There’s a surprising through-line of Grace all the way through the Bible. If you read the Old Testament and think something different, you aren’t reading it right. All those people who got their heads chopped off were on the tail end of hundreds of years of a bender of Grace.
I can’t even begin to understand how people can read the Old Testament, about Baal, about Molech, about burning babies in hot oil and make Yahweh out to be the bad guy.
We should be unashamedly drunk on Grace all the time. No guilt in drinking deeply of love. A little trick to becoming an alcoholic is realizing that the hangover goes away instantly if you start drinking more the next morning. Accepting Grace and serving it to others is the only way people change anyways.
The truth is that God is a Bartender, preparing straight drinks of Grace, no ice, no cranberry juice. And somehow, He’s preparing the next one, sliding it over the counter, sitting next to us, and drinking it with us, all at the same time.
And we’re all feeling good.
Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?
But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.
Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.
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