It hit me while I was lying in bed this week, trying to go to sleep. (That’s the time, after all, when my emotions usually become fodder for target practice.) My relief at leaving a negative job situation was giving way to a much more familiar and persistent feeling.

Guilt.

Being one of two sisters, splitting things in half has been my way of life. My parents have been dealt hands of inequity over the years from people who should have known (and done) better, so they have always emphasized equal parts and treatment to the two of us, and it has been with that perspective that I have approached the world: do your part and get your share. And that’s what hit me this week in bed: with house payments and car payments and (my substantial) loan repayments showing up monthly, and me jobless for the foreseeable future, I am not doing my part. Which means The Husband is, on a purely mathematical level, doing more than his. And I have a problem with this that translates into guilt.

This is a marriage, and I’m not punching a clock. So what’s really going on here?

Having operated out of need most of my life, whether it was as a child needing protection or as a should-already-be-an adult dealing in emotional insecurity and needing affirmation, I reached a point of virtual self-sufficience once I finished school and moved across the country. I had to. And though the finances were dicey and sparse the entire five years I set up camp in Manhattan, I managed to get my ducks in a row and wave my flag of independence. As my budget took on order, my emotional life (after a few years of rampant upheaval) went through some cleanup too, and I began to cut back on the childish choices and eventually reached a tenuous peace with what I couldn’t control: no more scratching and clawing my way around a ladder that only led down. I found the guy, got the job, started the joint new life: vows, agreements, plans, budgets.

Promises are one thing. Plans are another. Promises we make to each other and are responsible for their outcome. Plans? We think we carve those painstakingly into stone when we’re actually writing in a child’s hand with crayon on flyaway paper. The world doesn’t owe us our plan. The world doesn’t deal in equity.

Life has a way of exposing our need just when we’ve gone to all the trouble of removing it. And if I can’t stand neediness when it comes from other people, there’s one thing I hate even more: my own neediness bare to the world. Even to TH, who is so much better than I at building upon a foundation of love than equity, of grace rather than fairness. Reminds me of Someone else.

I learned early that the world didn’t play fair, but I took refuge in my idea that God did. It turned out that he is less concerned with my idea of Fair and Just and Equitable, not least because I have a stunted view of what these things actually look like, but also because grace goes beyond what fair ever could. Grace shows mercy, and sometimes mercy can look like broken bones and slammed doors if they keep me from a path of destruction. Or pure selfishness.

Sometimes people lose their security even though it’s not fair. Sometimes that’s the only way those people can learn what it means to be loved beyond what’s fair.