Forgiveness Heals All Wounds

Grace:  A willingness to be fair and forgive; the exercise of love, kindness, mercy, favor.

I've always loved this concept, this quality.  In my Christian upbringing, grace was primarily described as God's unmerited, undeserved favor - his free gift of love, forgiveness, and strength given to me despite my sins.  Sigh.  This still irritates me.  It feels full of self-importance on God's part.  What a big guy you are, God!  We're made with faults and defects by God and then God forgives us for our faults and defects?  When I'm made the next creator of the universe?  Then I'm designing life so that there aren't these faults and defects that need to be forgiven. While I do believe in Divine grace and am grateful to receive it this still sounds to me like doing something nice and expecting recognition.  Today, in my day to day activities, I try to extend grace to everyone I come across and to do it with humility and a lack of ego.  This is not easy and I fail much of the time but I've gotten a lot better at giving everyone and everything a break and not doing it with too much self-importance and self-congratulation.  God or a Higher Power or the universe has bestowed so much grace to me, buried me under tons of grace, treated me with love and kindness when I didn't deserve it and so much more often then treating me poorly, that I feel a calling to try to return the favor, to pay it back.

My morning meditation book today: "We don't have to have all the answers, or act in the most mature way, or be the best friend ever.  There is room for error in everything because nothing is gained in perfection the first time around.  We can make mistakes because mistakes are sometimes the only way to perfection."

When that driver in front of me doesn't use his turn signal today I think: "Eh.  Guy made a mistake" instead of flying off into a judgemental rage.  I continue to practice pausing a beat when I don't like something, letting awareness and perspective seep in, finding that much of the time I roll my eyes at the thought that I could have gotten angry and ruined my day and not changed anything and for something so unimportant.  So I beep at the guy and make an obscene hand gesture?  This is going to correct something?  This is going to make the guy think: "Oh, man, you're right, sorry.  I won't do that again, ever?"  Nine times out of ten it's just going to provoke an equivalent response and then not only have I ruined my day I've degraded someone else's day as well.

"Forgiveness heals any wound."

The Toltecs, the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, I mean, c'mon, forgiveness as a way of bestowing grace on oneself is an important load-bearing cornerstones of every spiritual practice that I know of.