Move with grace

Sometimes I allow people and situations to just wear me out.

Recently I have found my emotional cup at its peak and at those moments it seems life is most volatile and I am most prone to pride.

I was annoyed and so blinded to the truth.

I was hurt and so arrogant of my own wrongs.

Shamefully, I voiced these opinions to other friends who listened.

They supported my frustrations—as friends often do.  They offered advice. They told me to speak out. They told me to walk away. They told me a million things that I felt in my own heart—my prideful,deceitful heart.

They offered prayers and support—another things friends often do, but I found my frustrations only amplified rather than sated. They were loving me, but not in the way that I needed at the moment.

Without realizing it I began to pray. I was so tired of being…well, tired. I felt as though this battle I was fighting was one I had fought a million times and frankly I was just exhausted. (Isn’t it one of the most beautiful things to just find oneself praying, though? To be caught up in the middle of prayer and find that peace that only comes from a dependence on God?)

And once I had vented all that I wanted to say to God he offered me beautiful words of encouragement from the most unlikely of sources. I had recently sent a friend a few past blogs. One that spoke of my current frustrations—one that spoke of where I wanted my heart to be. This friend and I do not share the same faith, but his response encouraged me in a way that none other had. He told me he envied my ability to believe and that he felt my prayers were leading to something. He said he admired my strength and then ended his message with the last words his grandfather told him the day he died:

Move with grace, it’s just pain

And something changed in my heart at that moment—how I wish it were a forever change, but my heart is a mess and tends to stray—I found myself questioning things and sent them to another friend:

What if rather than allowing myself to become angry, I see every wrong done against me as an opportunity for prayer?

What if rather than seeking my own justice, I sought love trusting God to deliver justice where He sees fit and being content in that?

What if I allowed the doors of my heart to be opened and loved without fear?

What if I allowed God to guard what I am incapable of guarding and studied his word well enough to be close enough to know when to act and when to be silent?

I think the greatest problem I face at present is that somewhere down the line I became so afraid to love that I became vengeful and angry when I was wronged. I think that is the natural human response, but I think we are also called to something more.

Just my musings, but I think I am onto something better than the bitterness I so often allow to invade my thoughts and heart and when I am broken.

This most beautiful of hearts opened my eyes to the very things I had begun to consider in her response, that all was never as I saw it but that love really was at work. I just missed it—as I often do.

I listened in my office today to husbands complaining about wives and friends complaining about friends and I thought, “How quickly we choose to complain about everything rather than seeking love—seeking God first and letting him lead us to the best guidance for our hearts.

I pray with everything in me that I can execute this change that I can look past the things that frustrate me to the love that may be hidden within its layers. That I can see past my own pride and selfishness and find God’s grace and mercy and share that with those around me rather than my own bitterness and pains.

When I hit the ground

Neither lost nor found

When I’m on my knees I’ll still believe

-Holland Road by Mumford & Sons