Self-fulfilling Grace

News flash: you are human and at some point in your life you will do something incredibly stupid, horribly humiliating, majestically messed-up, and/or just plain idiotic. And sometimes, you will manage to do all of the above in the same day.

But it's OK...really, it is.

The beauty of being human is that we are not perfect, and no one has the right to expect perfection from us. We are beautifully blemished and wonderfully wonky in all the right ways. Best of all, we can learn from our mistakes and grow through our weaknesses. Being wrong means we might be headed in the right direction.

Grace is one of those buzz words we hear a lot about, especially in faith-based discussions. What is grace? It's unmerited favor...it's getting something good that we don't deserve. We normally hear this when talking about God and His love for us. Grace is what allows us to have a relationship with God, even though we didn't do anything to earn it.

But grace is also something we need to give ourselves. We work hard to accomplish great things and to make people proud of us. We try to do our best and make the right decisions...but life is messy. Sometimes things just go wrong, and instead of learning from the situation we beat ourselves up.

Sometimes we just give up.

When things to wrong we need to offer ourselves a little grace and learn to see the big picture: we're human and we make mistakes. Learn from them and move on.

I guarantee that before the week is out you will do something that you wish you hadn't. You will be hard on yourself, or feel a little defeated because you should have known better. There is a chance that you could have prevented this catastrophe, but you didn't so now you have to deal with the repercussions. Time to put on the big boy/girl pants on and face the music.

But instead of being harsh...even if you deserve it, give yourself a break. Offer yourself a little bit of grace and acknowledge that you're human, that you're fantastically flawed and find something good that can come from the mess you've made.

It takes courage to put yourself in the position where you can make mistakes. It takes a brave soul to step out into the world and risk public failure. But safe is boring.

And no matter how badly you've screwed up...I will still love you and God will always love you. I promise that we're not going anywhere.

If you have trouble doing this, call me. We'll exchange stories about the silly things we've done in the past (oh, do I have some whoppers), and then we can share the lessons we've learned from these magical mistakes.

This little song from Switchfoot illustrates my thoughts on this topic rather well...so sit back and enjoy. Or jump around and sing at the top of your lungs...'cause I sure am.