Law vs. Grace

I recently took a class called "The Doctrine of Grace." Really it was a good look at the book of Romans, which by the way, has always been one of my favorites. I get Paul. He and I probably would have been friends (after the whole "killing Christ followers" phase was put behind him). This struggle with how to relate to God is a big one. Do we try harder to be better or do we simply rest in the grace offered us through Jesus Christ, allowing our doing to be an outpouring of our being. It seems as if it would be an easy answer, and yet there are thousands of Christians all over the world trying to "earn" their way into God's good graces. It's not necessarily that we cognitively choose to do it, but our culture is such that performance is rewarded, and so we translate that ideology to our relationship with our Creator.
I have been reading a lot of Henri Nouwen lately. (If you've never read anything written by him, I would say you need to.) He has a way with words. A few days ago, I was reading some things he wrote about joy. He said "joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing can take that love away...joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety."
We have to choose joy. This is the same as choosing to live under grace and not under law. Every day we have a choice. We can choose to live as if what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us is how we earn our way to God; or we can choose to believe that we are unconditionally loved and our relationship to God has been paved by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Today I choose joy. Not because it is easy, but because it good. And I choose to rest in the promise that I am loved and accepted apart from what I do today.