Grace. This word has so many associations to it. It can lift us out of our judgmental states, fill us with a sense of mercy. It can make us hesitate, and rethink how to approach someone or some issue in life that is causing us strife or tension. Grace seems to be a teacher on a different perspective on life and seems to bring us back to a time we are trying to recall as lovely and innocent.
Grace. It tends to bring life into balance. It has a power to allow things to happen and bring us to a loving place that transcends judgment or egoistic reactions to something negative. However, what is grace really?
Let’s allow ourselves to dig deeper. Ok? Let’s go on a ride back in time. Each one of us has a beginning. Go back to one of your earliest memories of being a child and playing freely with not a care in the world. Don’t try too hard to remember the details of the event but try to feel the feeling of being a child playing freely again. Do you feel it?
When you start to feel it, regardless if you think it’s your imagination or a true authentic feeling of being connected to this child of yesteryear, allow yourself to accept it right now. Notice how this feeling is still evident today as it was then. Now hold onto this feeling and add a worry, a grievance you have toward someone, a mistake you made, etc.
What happened when you added this current day negative issue? Did the child like feeling leave you? Did it stay but lessened as you ruminated over the negative issue?
Grace has four ingredients: negative emotion, acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion. To break it down more, we can see that grace is a positive feeling that seems to override a negative issue where negative feelings reign supreme. When we were children, we played freely. We might have had a bad day because we didn’t get what we wanted or were punished due to poor behavior, but later that day it is so easy for us to go play and feel that freedom of being alive. This quick turn of emotion a child has, is what the power of grace can do for us today as adults. We can have a crappy day but if we accept and forgive what transpired earlier, we can then be freed up to be who we want to be – free and loving.
Let’s now take a look at forgiveness. What is this most important ingredient in grace? Forgiveness in the highest form is not allowing someone’s negative behavior or our own negative or mean-spirited behavior toward others as acceptable. Forgiveness is an attitude of understanding toward a grievance done to you or what you’ve done to someone. Forgiveness is full of compassion with a solid knowing of where this grievance came from and why. If someone was mean-spirited to you or accused you of something you didn’t do, you now have an opportunity to practice forgiveness. This is where acceptance comes in which again is different from allowing negative behavior to persist.
If we accept what happened as someone’s lack of understanding of a situation because of their selfishness and hurt, we can then ask God for His compassion in that moment. This compassion has a “knowing” in it that allows us to understand what and why this person did what they did. Everyone is hurt somehow. We all carry wounds around inside us that haven’t healed. Someone’s negative behavior or reactive nature toward something we do or vice versa stems from a previous hurt or pain. When we forgive someone, we then receive compassion or knowledge of this persons unresolved pain. This pain feels like ours and we then can cover it with grace.
All of this is inside us. We have access to these life and world transforming tools when we don’t react out of our own pain or hurts. These hurts come from a divisive force called the ego or Satan. Hurts are justifications of the egoistic mind to react to others hurts or negative behaviors in a harsh or violent way. It’s a punch for punch boxing match that never ends unless a healing force is allowed to come enter the match. This healing force is allowed to come through if we don’t react out of our hurts or ego. Again, it’s not allowing the behavior to continue but allow the healing force to come into our consciousness.
When we don’t react, we can then accept the situation which creates a space to allow this healing force to come into our consciousness. It’s a higher force because it covers the negativity and creates a separation between the issue at hand and who you really are. You become “made new” so to speak because you start to identify with this higher force as controlling you in a loving and kind way. This allows you to be loving and kind back to anyone who reacts negatively to you and you become less negative in your reactions as well.