Friday Thoughts by the Fire: #81

Who we hoped to be

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

“We are not who we hoped to be”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about grace lately. Grace is the thing in life that allows us to move forward. It is almost as powerful as love. In fact, I think it takes love to have grace.

Grace for others and grace for ourselves.

Benedict Cumberbatch said, “we all want to escape our circumstances, don’t we?” It takes grace. It’s a gift given.

I think at some point in all of our lives we set out to be a specific person. We set out to be kind, compassionate, we want to be understanding, we want to be remembered as funny, perhaps.

There is some version of us that exists in our minds as the ideal version. Physically, emotionally, all of it. At least I know there is for me, but then again maybe I’m weird.

The problem is that we’re very unlikely to evolve into this ideal version of ourselves simply due to the fact that we will never be perfect. This is where grace sticks the landing for us.

It’s beautiful that you can be less than ideal. Maybe you have bad days. Plural. Maybe you have a bunch of bad ones in a row. Maybe you yell at your kids, your significant other, you screw up at work, you’re unfocused. Maybe you’re depressed.

Maybe you want to complain about every little thing. Like you want to have permission to be a giant whiner some days. And then maybe you feel guilty about those feelings because you know that inevitably someone has it much worse than you do.

Grace is beautiful.

Relient K put it like this in one of their songs, “the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair”.

We often don’t deserve it. But that’s why it’s a gift. I’m learning in life that one of the most profound gifts you can give yourself is grace.

It is impossible to move past foot-holds, chains, bitterness, feeling sorry for yourself, anger — and many other emotions that make us feel stuck — without it.

Grace makes healing possible. It makes the limbo of life a little more bearable. And it makes you believe, even for a moment, that despite your circumstances you do deserve good things.

There is profound value in knowing who you are, not just who you want to be. It’s easy to compare ourselves to someone else and wish that we were like them. But I believe that each of us were created with purpose.

That means in the universe of DNA, I am a 1 of 1 product, and you are too. Our genetic makeup, combined with our unique life experiences, have molded us into people unlike anyone else. We’re each uniquely equipped with something that nobody else has.

This is why grace is so necessary and important. You deserve the flexibility to not be at your best. No one else knows what it’s like to be you. Grace provides the opportunity for us to emulate that ideal version of ourselves without ever having to be perfect.

What a beautiful thing.

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