the space grace creates

Aug 28

Dear Reader,

We all know what it feels like to be measured only by our mistakes.

A single failure, comment, or reaction can outweigh months of good effort. And if we are honest, we know we have done the same to others: reducing them to the hardest thing we’ve seen instead of holding the whole of who they are. These experiences stay with us because they cut against the truth that people are always more than their worst day.

That is why grace matters.

Grace becomes most important at the moments when it feels hardest to offer. Sometimes it is when we realize we’ve fallen short of our own intentions. Other times it is when someone close to us responds in a way we cannot make sense of, or when an old pattern shows up again just as we thought we had moved past it.

Without grace, those moments easily harden into judgment. A harsh word becomes proof of who someone is. A setback becomes evidence that we will never change. The story shrinks until all we can see is the worst moment.

Grace widens the view. It makes space for complexity. It allows failure and effort to sit side by side without canceling each other out. It does not excuse what matters, but it refuses to reduce a person, ourselves included, to only what went wrong.

When we learn to extend grace inward, the shift is often even more profound. Instead of treating every misstep as evidence against us, we can begin to see it as part of the larger work of becoming. We still hold ourselves accountable, but we also hold ourselves as human.

To give grace is to resist collapsing a life into its most difficult moment. It is to look again, and to see not just what went wrong, but what still remains possible.

Yours in the journey,