I found myself with some unexpected windshield time the other night so I started dialing the kids in order of succession. Sometimes it is the most convenient time to catch up.

Our No. 2 child took it for the sibling team on this night and answered.

“Hey, son!” I said. “Just wanted to call and see how your week is going!”

“Well, evidently better than yours,” he quipped. “It’s only Monday night, Dad.”

So it goes. … We all have those weeks, right? The weeks that feel like seven days of Monday cemented back to back … to back.

Weeks where at the end of the day you recognize you haven’t made a dent in your to-do list because so many other fires came up.

The weeks in which sequentially scheduled meetings slam into each other like a multiple car pile-up on the interstate, and no one comes out unscathed.

The weeks when you simply cannot possibly complete all of your obligations; when you break all your promises; and when you let people down. Let everyone down, it feels.

The weeks in which you blow newspaper column deadlines by a day … I mean 24 hours or more. Seriously.

The weeks in which you don’t feel enough, that you can’t ever meet all of your responsibilities, and when you feel that you are failing the people who depend on you most.

Friends, why is it that as people of faith, and believers in God’s infinite grace for all, do we find it so hard to give ourselves the very same grace?

Because, unfortunately, the world has a way of convincing us that while everyone else is deserving of God’s endless mercy and love … we are not. 

I see it all the time in my pastoral work. And we swim in an ocean of this deception every single day among the neighbors we serve at our emergency mission and food pantry.

We are a society of people who have convinced ourselves that somehow we individually are THE only person unworthy of God’s unlimited grace that we know and cherish.

Oh, and I’ll carry the banner, friends! … I got all the grace in the world for you, but on many days … me? Not so much.

“Cut yourself some slack, Dad,” said our son on the phone. “Remember what you tell us all the time: Your worth is not in what you do. It is in being a beloved child of God.”

I was not this wise in my early 20s. Trust me.

If your most challenging faith obstacle is accepting that God’s grace is given to you as freely as it is to every other single person, please hear this from me: You are a beloved child of God, and you receive his mercy just like everyone else.

Be well, my friends, and know that you are loved! Amen.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.