Faith & Formation
Where Is Grace Already Present?
There is a reason pilots use checklists and it is not that pilots are forgetful.
It is that a human being under acute stress loses access to exactly the faculties the situation requires. Working memory narrows. Options disappear. The impulse that arrives first stops feeling like an impulse and starts feeling like the situation itself — as though there were nothing else available.
A checklist does not make you calmer. It works by keeping your hands off the panicked thing for the few seconds it takes the trained thing to surface.
These are the six I give people. They are designed to be photographed and kept on a phone, because the moment you need them is not a moment you will be able to remember them.
the six questions
- What is happening externally? Just the facts, the way a camera would have them. Not what it means. Not what it says about you. What a stranger in the doorway would have seen.
- What is being activated internally? Where it landed in your body, and how old the feeling is. Most of what arrives in these moments is older than the moment.
- What is this revealing about my relationship with God? Revealing, not deciding. The distinction is the whole book.
- Where is grace already present? Already. Past tense, currently true. Not what you are hoping for.
- What faithful action has grace made possible? One action, available now, that you could not have taken from inside the panic.
- What must be remembered afterward? Because you will forget this, and forgetting is the default.
Out of order is allowed. Question four first, if that is what you can reach.
why question four does the most work
Four is the hinge, and it is the one people resist hardest, because under pressure the honest answer feels like nowhere.
But notice what the question does not ask. It does not ask you to feel grateful. It does not ask you to find a silver lining, or to be pleased about what just happened, or to produce a reason the thing was secretly good. Those requests are why most people have learned to distrust this kind of question.
It asks a factual question about the present tense. What is already true right now that was not guaranteed?
Sometimes the answer is very small. You are still in the room. The conversation is still happening. Nobody has left. You noticed before you spoke this time, which is new. The child is asleep and did not hear it. You have three minutes before you have to respond at all.
That is not consolation. It is inventory. And the reason it matters is question five, which is unanswerable without it: an action is only available if something is already holding it up. Ask five without four and you get willpower, which fails under exactly these conditions. Ask four first and five turns into a fairly ordinary question about what to do with the ground you are actually standing on.
what Scripture actually says about this
The order here is not mine. It is the order the Psalms use constantly, and it is the reverse of how most of us pray under pressure.
We tend to open with the ask. The psalmists open with the account — frequently a long one, frequently unflattering, naming exactly what is happening and exactly how it feels, before anything is requested. Psalm 13 spends four lines on how long before it gets anywhere near a petition. Psalm 77 spends eleven verses on the sleeplessness and the question of whether God has forgotten, and then turns on a single sentence: I will remember the deeds of the Lord.
Look at what that turn is made of. Not new information. Not a change in circumstances. A deliberate act of recall — question six, performed on some earlier day, being cashed in on a bad night.
one thing you can do this week
Photograph the six. Put them where your thumb already goes.
Then use them once, on something small — a tone in an email, a look across a table, not the hardest thing in your life. The point of running a checklist on a minor incident is that the checklist is a motor skill, and motor skills are not learned in emergencies.
Answer them out loud if you can. Out loud is slower, and slower is the entire mechanism.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC, has spent her career across from people being seen at the worst possible moment. Exposed but Not Abandoned: What Pressure Reveals and What Grace Makes Possible walks through all six questions with worked examples, and the companion workbook saves your answers so you can watch the window widen over months.