I contend that grace—rather than self-driven reformation—is the decisive catalyst for genuine transformation, and that embracing grace enables us to be known and to extend to others what we ourselves have received. I explain how shame and fear function as primary obstacles to being known and how grace interrupts the verdict that our past mistakes determine our identity. Drawing on Romans 12:2 and the story of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, I distinguish reformation, which depends on personal effort and renovation, from transformation, which is a metamorphosis requiring time, trust, and freedom. I describe grace in practical terms as pardon, acceptance, power, and gratitude, and show how it creates the space for learning, experimentation, and healing. I emphasize that receiving grace does not automatically produce change; true transformation is evident when one begins to give away what one once desperately needed. I invite listeners to cultivate humility, to move from mere knowing to sustained learning, and to consult resources at sgi-net.org and my Substack as companions on this journey.

Links referenced in this episode:

• sgi-net.org
• mondayswithmitsch.com
• drraymitsch.substack.com

You're listening to the Courage To Be known podcast.

I'm Dr. Ray Mitch.

Thanks for joining us.

We will start in just a moment.

Well, welcome and greetings everyone to another edition of the Courage To Be Known podcast.

I am Dr. Ray Mitch, your host.

I am delighted that you've taken time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with me.

Whether it's by the audio podcast or whether it's by the video one, you can enjoy either.

They will be available on Apple podcasts and you can toggle between the two if you're interested.

I'm not sure there's a lot of compelling reasons to do that, but be that as it may, so where we are, we are on episode 58.

It has been a little while since I have done it last.

It was way back in, gosh, October.

Not October.

October.

It is October.

Well done, sir.

It was in August that I did the last episode and I am trying, working at trying to do these in alternating weeks.

The Mondays with Mitch podcast, which came out today, by the way.

Yesterday, by the way.

Yes, yesterday, by the way, at 8am and you can find it under Mondays with Mitch or you can find it under my name or on YouTube.

You can find it there as well, either way.

And you can also find it at sgi-net.org underneath Resources Mondays with Mitch and go down to the bottom and you'll see another video part of the podcast.

So tell everybody.

I mean, I don't know that it has wisdom for the ages, but I suppose it has some wisdom to it.

And I am taking questions that people can ask and do that on the website there for Mondays with Mitch.

Actually, it has its own website name, mondayswithmitch.com and you can go to it directly and submit a question.

Give me some context, a little bit to your question and I'll be happy to take a run at it and try to answer it as best I know how.

Hopefully that would be encouraging to everybody because we ask our questions and we are usually we think we're alone in our questions, but we really aren't.

And it's really where we have that connection is that I ask a question.

I think I'm alone in that question.

I ask it and everybody around me or everybody else is listening goes, oh, gosh, I'm glad somebody asked that question because I was thinking about it myself.

So there is that part of it that I think we can engage in and participate together with.

So there's that podcast Mondays with Mitch comes hope, Lord willing and the creek don't Rise comes out on Mondays, roughly every other week, depending on the material I have and the questions I have, I probably will start harvesting questions from some of my students just to keep the thing, keep the rhythm going of that.

And then on off weeks, I will be doing the Courage to Be Known podcast.

For right now, I am going to be walking everybody through, Whoever's listening, all 12 of you.

I'll be walking you through the obstacles to being known and having the courage to be known by other people.

And again, this is the kind of thing.

And I'll be straight up with you on this one.

This is the kind of thing that I keep having to tell myself about.

I keep having to move into and taking the leap to do that.

Now, I, at some level, I see my life experiences and things like that as kind of the background for what I teach, and it comes out that way.

But in everyday life, I think it is an important aspect of the kind of community that we really say we want, but are usually terrified of taking the risk of being known that way.

And yet when we do, usually we realize that, one, we're not alone, and two, being known is actually fulfilling and filling the desire of our own heart.

So all that to say, enjoy both podcasts.

I hope that is encouraging to y'.

All.

And what we're after today is we will be walking through the material that I have developed over the years around grace and shame and all the things related to it, because those are the very things that are the obstacles to taking the risk of being known by others.

And that's why I'm doing that now.

The other side aspect of that is I'm buying time until I can get settled in how I'm going to do the interviews that I really wanted to be the backbone of this podcast.

I wanted you to be able to hear other people that are on this journey of being known by other people and what it means and what the challenges are and what they have found and all those kinds of things.

And some really, really cool stories, I would say, of people.

So these are normal, everyday people that you would pass on the street.

My bigger hope would be people that we look up to who seem very easy to know.

And the reality is that with social media and everything else, our tendency is to assume that we know somebody based on what we see on the screen and we really don't, and what goes into driving them along in terms of what they do and how they, like, preach or how they do music, singing and things like that.

So there's that.

That's a good part, I think of what we take what is going to be the backbone to the Courage to Be Known podcast I will be developing, I already have developed in some respects gear or as the phrase goes, merch that reflects this.

You're.

Having impacted by what goes on in the podcast and the things you've heard.

If you're interested, there are.

There are items on the website that you can get in terms of stickers, window stickers or things like that.

I haven't gotten fully into that.

I haven't set loose anybody to do that yet because I am literally a one man band in trying to do this and given my circumstances, it's really quite hilarious to think what that sounds like because it's usually out of key the nature of it all.

So anyway, enough of the the housekeeping kind of things.

What I want to look at is a topic that we love to talk a lot about but we really, really don't like.

Actually we will never admit it.

As a matter of fact, I did this presentation with my students a few weeks ago and I asked them, what don't you like about grace?

Now just that question alone is not one that you would entertain in most Christian circles because we're all supposed to love grace, right?

But the interesting thing about it is that the responses I got were all, well, I can't earn it, I can't do anything to deserve it.

And if it is offered to me a free gift, which it is, then I turn it into a transactional pattern that I understand that I know.

And that's our tendency is when we don't understand things about the nature of the world we're in, our relationship with God, we turn it into something we know, which usually is, excuse me, which usually is a transaction of some sort.

I'll do this if you do that kind of thing.

The fancy Latin term for that is quid pro quo.

So and all of those responses came up and ultimately grace is certainly a gift that has given us another definition of it is unmerited favor.

And when you look at it, our Philip Yancey once said that grace is the last great Christian word, the last great word in the English language.

Partly because it is everywhere.

It is included in grace, of course, gracious gratitude.

We often refer to people as your grace.

We say grace at dinner.

See, it's everywhere.

And we don't really spend much time grasping and understanding what exactly it means to live in grace.

We know what it is, and an upcoming article that will be published on Friday is called Is Knowing Enough and Grace is one of the casualties that comes with that, that aspect of what I'm talking about in that particular article.

So the thing that we have to take into account, or maybe ask ourselves the question, you know, what are we trying to do?

If grace is so important and it is so foundational to our faith and it's foundational to the change we want to make, what are we trying to actually do?

And I would ask the question further.

Are we trying to reform ourselves, or are we allowing ourselves to actually be transformed?

Now, these sound very similar.

Actually, the core of the word form is in both of those.

But really they are fundamentally different processes.

Now, that may jingle a bell in many people's minds.

From Romans 12:2, when Paul says, don't be conformed to this world.

Now, that's before he said, there is now therefore no condemnation for those that are in Christ.

And then he goes on to say, don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

What we tend to do in order to make it into something we understand or into something we can do something with, is that we enter and insert another step.

So Paul goes from conformed.

Conformed literally means think of play.

D'oh.

Factory, right?

You put Plato in, press the factory lever, and it presses it through a form, and out comes a very long star or a very long.

I don't know what the forms are recently.

I haven't done one of those for a while.

But it's conformed.

It's pressed into.

Literally, that's what conformed means.

Confidence with, formed with it.

But he goes from conformed, don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed.

Now, the word trans, and this is my word, nerdiness, coming out.

But when you look at both words have the same back end form or formed.

One is con, the other is trans.

Now, we have all sorts of things that jump to our mind the minute we hear the word trans, right?

Transgender and transsexual.

And what exactly does trans mean?

And we can probably get some understanding of what it is by looking at how it's used.

So transportation or translation or transliteration or transcendence or any number of a bevy of words that have that prefix in it.

What exactly does it mean?

And why is it so important?

Because trans, by the very nature of it, is describing a journey rather than a state.

It is.

I am moving from one state to another.

Now, the word underneath that which is incredibly fascinating, the word underneath it is the word metamorphosis.

That's where we get the word metamorphosis.

It's embedded in the Greek word that's used here that Paul uses.

So be metamorphosed by the renewing of your mind.

Now what we do is we go, instead of going from conformed all the way over to transformed, we enter, put in a new step in the middle of it, because this one is way too unsettling.

It's really way too obtuse, indescribable.

It feels like it takes too long.

So what do we do?

We put the word what I would call reformed in it.

So are we trying to reform ourselves or are we allowing ourselves to be transformed?

Now, notice the difference.

Are we trying to reform, which means I'm in charge of it, versus allowing ourselves to.

To be transformed?

Now, let me explain the differences between these, because reformation, this is the word we've inserted.

It's non scripture.

I'm not claiming to changing scripture here, but we add reformation into it, and reformation requires personal effort.

I got to work real hard.

I mean, some people would refer to as white knuckling.

In terms of our faith.

It depends on precision.

You do it the right way, with discipline, and you have to measure it at the end to know how far you're getting.

The focus here is improving what already exists.

So whatever has been conformed, I'm going to try to reform.

I'm going to try to improve that what already exists.

And really the thing to keep in mind here is that the basic building materials are exactly the same.

I mean, I do these podcasts from my home office, and if I slap a new layer of paint on it and reconfigure all of my furniture and everything else, I can say it's reformed.

It looks different, but it's really the same room here.

And the question underlying reformation is how can I make myself better?

Using God's resources, of course, Always.

But how can I make myself better now?

What about transformation?

Transformation is a little bit more unnerving because it requires what I said earlier is allowing ourselves to be transformed.

So transformation requires time, it requires trust, and it requires freedom.

I can't get the third finger out there.

If you're not watching this on video, that probably makes no sense anyway.

So time, trust, and freedom are the three things that are required for transformation.

It takes time because this is a journey.

It requires trust because someone else has to do it and requires freedom because I have to choose to participate in it.

The thing to keep in mind is that the building materials themselves have become something fundamentally different.

So the question Here is, what might I become if I allow grace to change me?

What might I become?

That is way too far out of our reach for a lot of people, really.

And so the thing to keep in mind, just to condense it all down, is that reformation tends to focus on behavior and transformation reaches for our identity, for the identity that has already been given us.

But we have to figure out a way to live into it and to live into and trust what God is up to in us.

So to demonstrate or to illustrate this, if you've ever seen the movie Les Mis, Les Mis has been around for a long time.

And what I want to try to do is to create a narrative here, framework for what this journey actually looks like.

So if you watched it, the one with Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway and some other.

Those were the two headliners in the movie.

In the first scene, where Valjean, we have two main characters.

Oh, Russell Crowe is the other guy.

So we have two main characters.

Valjean.

Jean Valjean, which is the first character.

The second one is Javert.

Jovaire is an inspector.

He is about the law, and he is chasing down who is considered a criminal in Valjean.

Valjean is in prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister, who.

Whose child is sick.

He leaves prison.

He finally gets to the end of his sentence, and they give him a piece of paper that says that he is a convicted criminal.

So he lives, leaves prison, carrying an identity that is shaped by condemnation.

And so when he's wandering from village to village, he goes to try a job, and he gives this sheet of paper and he's a convict.

And so nobody wants to hire him.

So he beds down in the door of a church to sleep, and the bishop comes upon him and invites him in for dinner.

And he wolfs down his food in the most disgusting sort of way.

And the bishop prays, thank you for our brother that has come as our honored guest.

And he looks up and it's like, who are you talking about?

And so when the bishop and his housekeepers go to sleep, he steals from the bishop.

He steals all the silver.

And ultimately he is caught and he is drugged back to the church in front of the bishop and thrown on the ground.

And gendarmes says, we found him.

He's stolen your silver.

And.

And he claims that you gave it to him.

And the bishop says, he is right.

I did.

And so instead of condemning Valjean, he gets him out of his shackles.

The police leave, and he says, I have bought your soul for Christ with this silver.

Now, the biblical references are profound here, but he extends him grace and he gives him what he does not deserve.

His point to Valjean is, make yourself use this silver to become.

Not make yourself, like I said before, become a better man.

So the question here is, what happens when someone treats us as something other than the worst thing we have ever done?

What happens?

Because ultimately, when that is offered us, God does.

I think we all know that.

But when that happens, we are usually looking over a shoulder and saying, what's the catch?

So Grace interrupts the story of Aljan and all that he has come to believe about himself being in prison.

And the bishop has disrupted that.

And he walks away with all this silver and he goes and hides his identity and eventually actually becomes the mayor of another little city.

Now, in scene two, if you've watched this, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Valjean in that moment.

The next day, Valjean has to decide what he is going to do with Grace.

Receiving grace does not automatically produce transformation.

That's a key.

And he faces this internal struggle because the old identity says, you're a criminal.

You have always been a criminal.

You will always be.

But grace introduces another possibility, and that is, you are free.

The bishop can't force Valjean to become different, but grace creates the possibility of transformation.

And now Valjean must learn how to live inside of that freedom.

And it's a real battle in the scene that I'm talking about.

So the key idea here is that grace does not simply change our circumstances, but grace does challenge the identity we have learned to inhabit.

And that's what is key to understand here.

Because Valjean could.

He said, the world has always hated me, and I hated it back.

And that's how I learned to live.

And yet, in this moment that the bishop offered him, Grace prayed for my soul.

And he had a decision to make.

And he decided to get rid of Valjean and become someone else.

That was his initial effort.

The last scene is at the very end of the movie.

And Valjean, you know, a lot has happened in the meantime.

He has adopted.

He has adopted Covet, who is the daughter of Fantine, who was in his factory.

It's a lot of backstory, but he has adopted her.

And she has lived in luxury, being the daughter of a mayor and a young man falls in love with Cosette.

Not Kovak, Cosette, and his name's Marius.

And he falls in with the student revolutionaries because this is set during the French Revolution.

He falls in love with Her.

He falls in with these revolutionaries.

They go through the battle, they get massacred.

Except him.

Why?

Because Valjean goes to save him from this battle that they are all sure to lose.

So what happens is Valjean finds himself in this remarkable reversal.

He now possesses power over Javert because Javert is trying to infiltrate the student group.

He's found out.

And now he's given to Valjean to do with as he sees fit.

He's given a pistol so the man who's relentlessly pursued him, Valjean, can retaliate and just shoot him.

Because that's essentially what he wants to do to him.

Instead, he releases him.

So the person who once desperately needed grace has become someone capable of giving grace.

That is transformation.

The evidence of grace is not merely that we've received it.

It is that.

That eventually we begin giving away what we ourselves once desperately needed.

The thing to keep in mind is, just because I know about grace doesn't transform me.

I can keep doing the things I've always done before.

And that's what gets in the way of us being known.

Because just like Valjean, we believe that we are what we have been told we are.

So there are two different voices here that we have to pay attention to.

The voice of shame and the voice of grace.

Much of our inner life takes place between these two competing voices.

Because the voice of shame says, you will always be what you've always been.

Your failures reveal who you really are.

Your past defines your future.

Your.

You should be better by now.

Shame offers very little room for transformation because shame assumes the verdict has already been delivered.

This is who you are.

That literally creates a barrier to accepting the grace that is offered us now.

Grace, on the other hand, grace says something radically different because it says there is nothing.

And this is the conversation between Valjean and Jovaire.

There's nothing you have to bargain for.

There's nothing I want from you.

There's no bargains, no petitions.

There's no negotiations.

There's no petition that you have to make to prove your worthiness.

And he says to Javert, you are free.

And Javert doesn't believe him.

He assumes that he's going to function by the same values of shame that Jovaire was operating by.

So he says, you are free.

And freedom creates the possibility that something new can actually emerge.

So what is grace?

Unmerited favor.

We just go to our definitions.

I'm not sure that gets us any farther to living in grace or living into grace.

And so understand, I'm not trying to provide A complete theological definition of grace in any way, shape, or form.

Entire books and libraries have been written about that.

I am not the person to try to do that.

Instead, I want to ask a more practical question.

What does grace look like when someone is actually trying to live differently?

Or in biblical language, what role does grace play in sanctification?

How does a person actually change?

And most of the time, when we ask that question.

I get that question all the time.

Yeah, but how?

It's like, I can't give you the 12 quick steps to living in grace because what did I say before?

Transformation requires time, trust, and freedom.

That trust is where this comes in.

So I would suggest that a working definition here is that grace is the beginning of healing because it offers us the thing we need most, the acceptance without regard to whether we are acceptable.

That's the working definition.

Grace creates the space for us to participate and accept the transformation that we have been invited into.

And with that space, several things become possible.

First, it creates freedom.

I'm no longer changing because I'm terrified of rejection.

See, I think we have to take into account do I spend my life avoiding shame, or do I spend my life pursuing love?

And in the pursuit of love, that's where transformation happens.

So I'm free to change because I'm already accepted.

And that's a profoundly different motivation.

The funny thing about it is the behaviors look exactly the same, but the motivation is what really, really matters here.

So grace creates this opportunity to learn a new response.

Transformation requires a willingness to.

To experiment with different responses, different how I relate, different ways of thinking, even different ways of responding to ourselves.

Because it really.

I mean, in a lot of ways, it starts with us.

I can't offer compassion to someone else that I'm not willing to give myself.

We think that's laziness, when in fact it isn't.

So grace really gives us the room to practice and to try different things and do different things.

Grace also allows us to discover our true identity in Christ.

When shame becomes quieter, we can become curious.

We can listen to the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit that invites us into trust me and walk with me, know me and choose differently.

So it allows us to discover.

So instead of what's wrong with me, we begin asking what's happening inside of me.

And I have been an advocate for journaling for, I don't know how long.

All my students are expected to participate in it.

I have done it for a number of years.

But that shift alone participates in the transformation that God wants to bring about.

In our lives.

So I think we have to understand there are four different ways to experience grace.

We experience it as pardon.

Grace is an answer to guilt because grace says, I did something wrong, and I can be convicted of doing something wrong.

Not shamed, convicted.

And the pardon acknowledges the wrong while refusing to make the wrong the final word of who we are.

Forgiveness doesn't pretend nothing happens.

It says what happened does not have to possess the future.

And that is part of the key.

Secondly, grace as acceptance.

Grace is an answer to shame.

Shame says, I am something wrong.

You will always be what you've always been.

But see, acceptance says, your failures may be real, but they're not the totality of who you are.

Grace allows us to be fully known without requiring us to disappear.

See, the thing to keep in mind here, folks, is that grace upsets the apple cart of our usual ways of doing things and thinking about things and thinking about ourselves.

That's exactly why we don't want to change it, because we'd rather be comfortable in our misery than uncomfortable in our freedom.

Thirdly, grace comes.

We also experience grace as power.

It's not merely permission to remain unchanged.

That's what a lot of people fear.

That's exactly what many of my students said.

I'll just settle for mediocrity.

Actually, grace provides the freedom and the strength to move toward my true self, to become fully who God created me to become.

So grace doesn't simply say, stay where you are.

What it says is, you no longer have to stay where you are.

Try doing something different, choosing something different, believing something different.

We can do that.

Sometimes our behavior leads away, and sometimes I have to believe something before my behavior changes.

And in a lot of ways, it's kind of a circle.

It's just a matter of where you enter that circle.

And therefore grace as that gratitude which is embedded in the word gratitude.

Eventually, grace begins changing how we see life itself, because we understand that life is saturated by the God who has offered us grace.

My old mentor used to say that we have to wake up to the fact that the world that we live in and the experience we have is saturated by God.

So life becomes a gift, and relationships do, and another day becomes a gift, and love becomes a gift.

Gratitude grows out of recognizing the lavish generosity of God.

It doesn't require us to grovel, but it does invite us.

Not require, invite us to try a different way of thinking and moving.

So we stop acting as though life is something we earned, and we actually begin receiving it as the gift that it is.

And so when we get to grace in everyday life, this is where grace moves from theology into ordinary experience.

There's grace and growth.

Grace and growth go together.

Children grow in environments where love and grace make experimentation possible before kids are contaminated by shame.

We marvel and maybe even laugh at their silliness and their freedom because they're not constrained by the things that we are.

With this kind of background noise of voices about, are you sure you want to do that?

Don't look stupid.

People may not like you, they will leave you.

And so they stumble, they mispronounce words, they fall down, try again.

And ultimately, we expect all of that.

But why would spiritual, emotional growth be any different?

Grace allows and creates a context for growth.

And another one which is embedded in it is that grace takes time.

It takes time to move from the economy of productivity to the economy of opportunity.

And perhaps one of the biggest problems in our culture is that we expect microwave transformation when God seems perfectly comfortable with crock pot growth.

It takes time.

It's slow, it's messy, it's gradual.

Sometimes it's not even visible from day to day.

But it's unmistakable over time.

See, our tendency is to think of change as 90 degrees or 180.

But think about it.

If you make 3 degrees of change, which to most of us would seem pathetic, but when we make three degrees of change and keep making those three degrees of change, the amount of change that happens over time is actually quite remarkable.

So three degrees is really all that's necessary.

And then what about learning?

See, I was doing a quote, unquote lesson.

Henry and I were learning how to write his name, and he mixes lowercase, uppercase, all of that.

And I said to him, I said, you know what's on the other end of your pencil, right?

We all plan on making mistakes.

It's called an eraser.

And see, we take that for granted because learning, the very nature of learning, requires mistakes and failure.

You cannot genuinely learn something new, learn anything new without being bad at it first.

I mean, think about riding a bike, right?

So grace creates the room for mistakes, for experimentation, for uncertainty, for correction, for trying again.

You look at sports, I mean, this is football season, right?

And every week the coach gets after the players, not berating them for the mistakes they make, but challenging them to learn from the mistakes they make.

And grace is only.

Is the context in which that occurs.

Now, I am not saying that coaches are, you know, paragons of grace.

I'm not saying that.

But without grace, mistakes becomes indictments.

And with grace, mistakes become Information.

Shame says you failed.

Grace says you're learning.

And then there's forgiveness, which is always a good one.

This is probably the most distorted thing that we understand about.

Not only grace is one of them, actually, but grace expects human weakness.

But that doesn't excuse everything people do.

It refuses to be shocked that imperfect people behave imperfectly.

Henri Noun once said that forgiveness is grace in action.

Perhaps our capacity to forgive others is connected to our willingness to acknowledge how much forgiveness we ourselves require.

Nouwen again describes forgiveness as love practiced among people who love poorly.

That may describe most human relationships.

We love.

We love imperfectly.

And therefore forgiveness becomes one of the ordinary rhythms of our relationships.

It is the oil that makes relationships work.

And so I have two more hang with me here.

Giving away what we could never afford.

There's another dimension of forgiveness here because grace means giving away something extraordinarily expensive.

Our release to someone who may never be able to repay us.

Someone has hurt us.

They can't undo it.

They cannot travel backwards.

They can't erase the event.

And no apology can compensate for what happened.

But grace gives away something the offender can't afford to repay.

That's exactly why it's grace.

And perhaps this is where we become most like Valjean.

We receive something we could never earn, and eventually we become capable of giving something another person could never earn.

The last thing I'd mention is grace and self acceptance.

Perhaps one of the hardest people to extend grace, too, is us, ourselves.

Self acceptance requires a number of things.

Accepting the gift as given.

I am accepted.

My old mentor used to say, I dare you to believe that God accepts you as you are, not as you should be, because you're never gonna be who you should be.

So we have to stop negotiating with Grace.

Stop insisting that eventually you'll become worthy enough to deserve it.

A gift that must be earned no longer is a gift.

I mean, think about it.

If you go to, you know, Christmas, we're not that far away, which is horrifying.

But you go to Christmas, you get your gifts, and you stop by your mom or your dad, and you say, oh, by the way, what do I owe you for what you gave me today, tonight?

And they'd look at you like you have three heads for one and say, you are out of your mind.

It's a gift.

So what do we do?

How do we do this?

I think we have to cultivate the humility, because accepting grace means admitting that I need it.

We're really.

We have really gotten hammered.

I think a lot about this whole idea of need.

We think having needs makes us needy.

But I have to realize that.

And realize means I know it, but I'm talking about something more deeply understood than that is that I can't engineer my own transformation.

Either I trust what God's up to, or I turn it into reformation.

That I can do.

I can't renovate myself into Christlikeness.

Ultimately, I have to commit to learning instead of knowing.

In my upcoming article on Friday, which I have already [email protected] is knowing enough, and the answer is no.

One of the most liberating shifts we can make is moving from I should know this already to I'm still learning.

I'm still on this journey of understanding because knowing demands certainty, learning requires humility, and grace creates room for learning.

So perhaps the question isn't how do I reform myself?

Maybe the deeper question is am I willing to trust enough to be transformed?

Because reformation asks what do I need to fix?

What do I need to control?

What do I need to improve?

But transformation asks what do I need to trust?

Who do I need to trust?

What do I need to release, and what do I need to receive?

And perhaps most importantly, what would happen if I stopped treating myself as a renovation project and started allowing grace to make me into something new?

This is the dilemma that I think we all face with grace.

Jean Valjean begins his story believing that his past has already decided his identity.

Grace interrupts the verdict.

At first, grace is something he receives.

Then it becomes something he gives away.

And perhaps that is the trajectory of transformation.

Grace received, grace believed, grace embodied and grace given away.

That is far more than reformation.

That is transformation.

Think caterpillar to butterfly.

Well, that's it for today.

Thanks so much for joining me.

A couple things I'd remind you of.

Be sure to hit up the [email protected] and check out all the resources.

Send in a question or two.

I would love to be able to tackle some of those as well.

Also, check out the substack Dr. Ray Mitch M I t s c h.substack.com Sign up Subscribe Participate in the conversation that results from that.

It's called Notes from the Shadowlands and it's about living with grace and suffering and in the shadow of the world that we now live in.

And it's about a lot of things.

It's one way that you can find out about my health status.

I'll be giving an update here shortly, and a variety of other things.

And so there's that there's a variety of resources here.

The website sgi-net.org the substack, this podcast, Courage to Be Known, and also the Podcast Mondays with Mitch.

And if you feel moved and you are encouraged, empowered by the things that I'm talking about in these podcasts and the things I'm writing, please consider partnering with us and allowing the ministry and the vision of Stained Glass International to continue.

We put on silent retreats twice a year and I'm open to the consideration of doing that more.

It is a unique opportunity people have, but it's a way for SGI to support people that can't quite afford it.

It's not cheap.

It's cheap by most standards, but it's still not cheap.

And so we scholarship people to be able to go to it.

So you can do that and you can partner with us.

And eventually my hope would be is creating groups where people can join together and understand about what grace looks like and to confront the voices of shame and begin to have a to begin to enjoy the community that I think we all ultimately were called to.

So and I, I think that's probably it.

That's all I can think of.

I'll probably miss something, but I'll catch up next time.

And so that's it it for today.

Thanks so much for joining me.

And until next time, love you later.

Bye.