Where Grace Meets the Ego

A couple of months ago, my wife and I were at HEB (the best grocery store here in Texas).

The kids were at their grandparents’ house, and we had found a show we wanted to binge watch, so we ran out to grab snacks and wine and just relax together for the evening. We bought wine and a cheese plate and some fancy snacks.

On the way home, I felt this incredible guilt and anxiety.

A few weeks earlier, I had been laid off from the job I’d had for the last seven years. And for someone who had built so much of my identity around career and achievement, the layoff felt like a kind of ego death. It deconstructed who I thought I was and what I thought I needed.

So there I was, driving home, having spent severance money on these gratuitously extravagant drinks and snacks, feeling fear and tightness in my body because I didn’t know where the money was going to come from in a few months.

The reality now is that I’ve decided to build my own consulting business. And building a business to provide for my family requires things that are deeply uncomfortable for me: outreach, visibility, coffee meetings, Zoom calls, exposure. Often, I would rather just be alone in my office. Outreach touches some older emotional programming, and maybe just a preference for introversion.

This is where karma yoga has become helpful language for me. Work is not becoming spiritual because it is glamorous or heroic. It is becoming spiritual because it exposes attachment: attachment to identity, attachment to control, attachment to being safe, attachment to the outcome.

The work of this season is not to kill ambition or pretend money does not matter. It is to learn a form of effort that is active without becoming fear-driven, and open to provision and gift and abundance without collapsing into magical thinking.

Effort is not opposed to grace. Maybe effort is where grace meets the ego in real life.

The question I keep asking is: what if the work I’m avoiding is the place where grace is trying to reach me?

I thought building a business would be about finding clients. I’m realizing it may also be about learning how to work, ask, risk, and be seen without turning the outcome into a verdict on who I am. And maybe, once in a while, learning how to enjoy the abundance of a good bottle of wine.