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Becoming a person of grace

Questions to Ask in 2021
An old friend picked a fight with me by email. It was unprovoked, out of the blue, and offered me a test. At first I wanted to respond defensively. But for all it’s drawbacks, the good thing about email is that it allows you time to think about your response. What’s really at stake here is …
By Seth Barnes

An old friend picked a fight with me by email. It was unprovoked, out of the blue, and offered me a test.

At first I wanted to respond defensively. But for all it’s drawbacks, the good thing about email is that it allows you time to think about your response.

What’s really at stake here is not my reputation. Most of the skeletons are out of my closets, and people can judge for themselves the fruit of my life.

What’s really at stake here is whether I can pass the test before me now. Some questions:
  • Will I be a person of grace?
  • Will I look like a disciple of Jesus by not responding in kind to an attack?
  • Can I trust God with my reputation?
What we all want and need is a generosity of spirit. We want to not be thin-skinned, to be able to absorb perceived slights.  But how? It begins with your sense of self-worth. Do you feel valuable as a person? If, down deep, you’re still reeling from the wounds of a childhood where your basic needs for food or security weren’t met, then you’re going to struggle to find grace.

My experience with graceless people is that they are almost all still recovering from some deep trauma. When they lash out in a hurtful way, their gracelessness is connected to that trauma.

We have a neighbor who as a boy one day saw a man kill his father with a shotgun. It was apparently over an affair with his wife. Our neighbor has become an irascible old man who lashes out at people for small, perceived slights. My guess is that it’s connected to that early trauma.

Psychologists tell us that we can get “stuck” in a stage of development. Somewhere along the line, our basic needs didn’t get met and while our bodies continue to grow, our character doesn’t. From that point forward, in a thousand graceless ways, we seek to meet those needs.

It’s an odd thing to see grown men and women seek to meet their needs for approval and love by tearing down other people. It’s the schoolyard behavior of people who are stuck. Life for them is a zero sum game. If I can take you down a notch, then I feel a little better about myself.

It’s the root cause of so much graceless behavior. And it begs the question, “How do I become a person of grace?”

The answer is that you’ve got to go back to that place where your needs didn’t get met and you got stuck. And you have to find a way to legitimately meet those needs.

I’ve seen how God wants to go back and mend old wounds and address insecurities, replacing lies with truth. It happens through prayer and therapy.
The truth is, God loves you and didn’t abandon you, even though it may have felt that way. Embrace that truth and then you no longer have to tear down others to feel good about yourself. You become free to respond to an attack with grace.

Changing years of negative behavior won’t happen overnight. God will give you hundreds of new opportunities to respond to new tests with grace. It’s hard work. It will look miraculous to those who have come to expect gracelessness from you. And in fact, it is miraculous. It’s a miracle available to all of us who are tired of the person we’ve become.

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