Living with grace...

There is nothing more beautiful than the struggle of hard work come to fruition. Whether you are striving to lose 100 pounds, afford a new car, circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon, or earn your PhD, your goals are no more and no less important than the guy on the bus next to you just trying to stay sober for the next 30 minutes. We have no idea what wars are being waged in the hearts of the people around us.

Take a moment to look around you. The people you're surrounded by? They are all you have in this moment. Are you going to judge them? Love them for who they are? Cringe at the mess you see in their lives? What do you think they see when they look at you? That whole thing about not judging others unless you're willing to be judged by the same standards...it's really good advice.

Be forgiving in the judgments you dole out, whether you speak them aloud of not. If there is grace in your thinking, there will be grace in your doing. And when you do things a little more softly you make the world a little bit better of a place. And couldn't we all use that?

There is little shame in being understanding, and much in being far too rigid.

Grace, pride, community, and love...

Grace.

I don't give myself enough grace. I certainly don't give anyone else the grace they deserve.

Why is that, I wonder? Why do I, and so many that I know, treat grace as though it's a limited commodity? Grace isn't a "here today gone tomorrow" thing...it's an attitude. A disposition. To be a person of grace is to be willing to swallow your own pride and put yourself in the other persons shoes and say "how would I like to be treated here?" Often times the way we would like to be treated in any given moment is far different from how we want to react with our own sense of righteous anger.

But how righteous is it really? I mean...if someone jumps ahead of us in a queue, offends us with some slight, or ruffles our feathers with some inane behavior, what sort of injury have they really done to us? Prickled our pride? Pride is an idea, a concept...There is no organ where pride is housed other than in the abstract concept of the 'mind'. If someone injures our pride, it's not as though they shanked us in the kidney.

So I return to my original question...why am I so unwilling to offer myself grace, and even more unwilling to extend it to others? How is that helping me build community? How is that helping me instill a sense of belonging and of worth in others? How does that spread my message of love?

Where to start, then? How to give grace. Well...I suppose it starts with loving myself as I want to be loved. Unconditionally.

That's hard. The problem with unconditional love? We are programmed with so many conditions. It's part of being human. But really, if I don't love my self with such a grand, graceful, permeating love, how can I ever expect anyone else to? What right do I have to claim such love if I can't give it?

So it is my will and my stated intention to learn to love myself for all the awesome bits and all the not so awesome bits. And I will also strive to love others more as I love myself...I often claim unifying powers of the philosophy of ubuntu (I am what I am because of who we all are), but now it's time to truly live those words.

Grace begets compassion, compassion begets understanding, and understanding begets community.

Live love, breathe love, be love; this is the only way.