DAY 30!!!! Grace and Gratitude, Part Two

I want to have some elegant, graceful way to say this, but I spent two hours traipsing around the very wonderful Western Washington campus today, then drove six hours to Spokane where I am now on a touch-and-go internet connection at a hotel, and my brain is not functioning. I thought about posting something else just to get my 30th day in, but I decided to get this one done instead. Possibly it's better to be brief anyway.

No one has vehemently disagreed with my attempt to define grace yesterday, so I'm provisionally defining it as a sense of abundant acceptance that overflows into the ability to be personally generous.  In other words, we feel not just accepted as we are, but abundantly accepted--we're not just scraping by, but we are more than enough, exactly as we are.


(At least in the way I'm using it here, "generous" has nothing to do with money. Probably all of us know someone who has a generous spirit who barely has two dimes to rub together.)

That ties back into C Joybell C's definition that grace is about both giving and receiving. In fact, probably for most of us the giving part is easy compared to receiving grace.

Because receiving grace involves letting it in. And letting it in requires opening, which requires allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, which means giving up control-- letting go of the idea that we can only receive what we deserve, what we have paid for (again, not in a monetary sense), what we feel we have earned by anxiously trying to be worth loving.

In other words, the ability to receive grace is completely the opposite of feeling entitled, feeling like I can control my transactions with people and with what-I-think-of-as-God and with life.

And gratitude is the quickest way I know to drop that transaction mindset. To remember that I'm just lucky to be here.

And there it is--the connection between grace and gratitude. It may not be what Oprah and Deepak meant, but it works for me.

Did that make any sense? It made total sense to me while we were endlessly driving last Thursday--it was a classic light bulb moment--but I may not have conveyed it very well. I'm posting this now because I am ready to be done but maybe it will need a follow-up.

I'm taking a break from posting for at least the rest of the week (because November is over and I FREAKING CAN), and maybe a bit longer. Not sure.