Grace, what does it really mean, and why is it so important? Grace is such a powerful action, a choice that we must all make. Grace means to extend kindness, understanding, compassion and even forgiveness, even when someone has fallen short, made mistakes, had a bad attitude, without imposing our own judgements. Grace is about putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand and have compassion for what they may be going through. We all may think we know what we might do in certain situations and how we would get ourselves out of situations that we have never been in. When we are in the midst of a terrible storm, actually living in a difficult season what we think we might do or how we might act and handle things isn’t always so black and white. Sometimes it’s harder to do the things we once thought we would do in someone else’s situation. We tend to judge people for not making the same choices we think we would. We may even look down on them for not making those choices, or not moving fast enough to change their situation, but again until we are faced with that same storm, that same trauma, that same setback, none of us really know what we would do, or how we would react.

This is where the act of giving grace comes into play. Sometimes instead of setting our minds in judgement we have to take a step back away from ourselves, listen and try to imagine what someone else may be going through. Pay attention, do they seem to be struggling, just treading water instead of swimming hard to escape the waters they seem to be drowning in. When we struggle, when we are in the middle of a storm, it’s not always as easy as it sounds to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps, shake off the stress, the burdens, to move forward and out of our situations. Sometimes the fear, the depression, the anxiety of it all has us tightly in its grasp. We feel like we are suffocating, unable to breathe or even move from the panic and fear our body seems to be living in. When we give grace to each other it’s a way of showing our love and support. It’s an act that breathes life into Hope and when we feel hopeful it starts to feel like we are finally starting to get some oxygen. Our bodies relax more, our minds stop racing as much, we start to think a little more clearly and slowly we start working towards a new chapter in our lives. It may not be the one we imagined before but now we can start to imagine a new future, maybe even one better than the one we had imagined before. It calms the waves we thought would take us under. We start swimming slowly towards the shore, no longer just treading water. We can finally see the rays of hope starting to shine through. It gives us peace, courage and grows our faith that we are getting close to the end of this season of darkness.

Grace is not something we should just give to others. More times than not grace is something we have to give to ourselves. Too many times, we beat ourselves up for wrong choices, a mistake, most of time for things that weren’t even in our control. It’s been a hard lesson for me, and I am still navigating the power of grace, what it really means and how it should really feel. I have spent a lot, and I mean a lot of time beating myself up for things that weren’t my fault, that I could not control. For how others treated me or how things in my life unfolded that I could not help. I took the blame and responsibility on my shoulders, made it my problem, my issue to solve, even when I didn’t really have the power to do that.

I am really starting to understand the true meaning and power of grace, I realize that not only do we have to give others grace, but we must give grace to ourselves. We must allow ourselves to feel our feelings. We mustn’t beat ourselves up for things in our past be it our fault or at the hands of someone else, doing so only keeps us stuck, unable to move forward and pick ourselves back up when we fall. Giving ourselves grace allows us the patience, the calmness to grow, to really process everything and gives us the ability to find the hope that helps us correct our course.

Whatever difficulties we are going through, dealing with or having to think about, let’s decide right now that we will give ourselves the grace we need to make it to the other side.  To pray that this grace will give us peace, clear our minds, feed our souls, heal our wounds and give us the hope that will drive us up out of our situations and give us the strength to rise up into our next new exciting chapter.

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