Generous Grace

If you happened to catch CBS Sunday morning recently, Faith Salie, a CBS News correspondent, did a short expose on grace.  She pointed out that grace has become a popular catch phrase in recent years.  Society talks a lot about extending grace in these challenging times.  For many of us, the concept and understanding of grace came in our Christian upbringings.  It was the idea of unmerited favor by a benevolent God.  The word also came to define a physical attribute that some of us were born with and others not so much.  The best dancers in my early dance classes were “graceful” while others seemed to have two left feet.  “Grace” became a popular name for baby girls after the actress turned princess Grace Kelly, and the name had a resurgence of popularity in the early 2000’s. 

After our son passed away, I coined the term “grace for ignorance” for people who meant well but said things that were not helpful and sometimes even hurtful.  They said them with the best of intentions, but they did so without having the experience to know they caused more pain than comfort.  An example would be “I’m so sorry you lost your son.  You’ll be able to have more.”  Or, “I know exactly how you feel.  I was devastated to lose my great aunt last year.”   I would thank people who said such things, though in my head I was thinking, “you have no idea”.  But I came to understand that you can’t quantify loss and it’s better just to extend grace than try to explain it and hope that life would never teach them the difference. 

Although the world talks a lot about grace these days, I think perhaps it has become something more to say than do.  People actually seem less patient, more intolerant, with anger or irritation bubbling beneath the surface like a big, black, internal tar pit.  Some of us get mired down in the dark side of life, and it’s hard to extend grace when you’re not feeling like you’ve been offered any. 

So what does grace look like in these complicated times?  Perhaps it’s smothering the tar pit with patience, tolerance and kindness – unmerited favor, undeserved grace.  In order to be able to do that, we have to work to keep our internal peace and love for others whether they are loveable or not.  And then it starts with small things – a smile, a kind word, an offer to help.  Sometimes it takes bigger things – letting someone go first, overlooking offenses, keeping your cool when it would be easier to bite back.  It might involve trying to understand where someone else is coming from – not necessarily agreeing with or condoning their behavior, but offering a hand instead of a kick to the curb. 

I have a feeling that practicing grace as a pattern of life likely produces long-lasting ripples.  We’ve all heard of those lines at the drive through where people pay for the person behind them and it continues for several cars.  The idea of “paying it forward” starts with adopting grace as a part of your character that you can grow internally and it produces a whole crop of grace that nourishes not just one person, but a village.  Grace isn’t something that can be forced, it starts in the heart, with tiny seeds that each of us can plant in ourselves, then water, fertilize and harvest.  Farmers of grace, so to speak.  In the right conditions, a well-raised crop of grace can feed a lot of people.  “Remember this: whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will reap generously.”  (Luke 6:38).  Generous grace sounds like something we could all use more of.