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Happy Friday everybody!  So glad you’re back!  You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about grace lately.

American Author Brennan Manning said that “Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover.  Grace is enough.”

I think that often, we mistakenly view Grace as an ideal to be reserved for religious or spiritual conversations. As Brennan pointed out, we try with all of our might to find something that Grace cannot cover, oftentimes that something or someone is ourselves.

We seem to give grace to others without a second thought:  to the woman who steals the gas pump that you’d waited ten minutes for.  Or the teenager who’s just given you the side eye for no reason whatsoever. Or to the store clerk who barely acknowledged you in the check-out line.

When was the last time you gave yourself a little Grace?

But when it comes to ourselves, no grace for you! We huff and puff through our personal Arenas, striving for perfection knowing that it is literally impossible but we try anyway.  And then we rate ourselves poorly when we fail to reach the mark.  We work ourselves to the point of exhaustion, pushing ourselves from one situation to another, then we feel guilty because we were unable to cram seven days of life into the two days of our weekend.  We lie awake at night or we wake early in the morning to add more and more things onto the mental to-do list that is starting to resemble a scroll of never-ending commandments.

We worry that our houses aren’t clean enough, our children aren’t accomplished enough and oh my gosh, the baby is going through a phase where he will not eat anything but peanut butter!  And why isn’t my dog as cute and as happy as the one on the commercials?

And then there is social media, as we become consumed with bad cases of FOBI, fear of becoming irrelevant so oh my goodness, I must post more stuff!

Stop.  Just pause for one minute.  You’ve been tough on yourself, maybe for all of your life but when was the last time you gave yourself a little Grace?  When was the last time you gave yourself a pass?

Grace Is Enough

I get it.  You are busy and there are a lot of things competing for your attention. Most days you handle it just fine and you move from thing to thing like a boss.  But then there are the days, the graceless days when you just want to run and hide. The days when you are doing your best to cope with everything you’ve been given in life.

Stop. Begin where you are. Forget what happened yesterday or a week ago or even a year ago.  Give yourself grace.  Cover yourself in it. Hide in it.  Grace is enough.

Ignore that annoying voice that points out all of the ways that you’ve fallen short or not met the mark. So what?  You’re not perfect.  Nobody is.

Grace is enough.  Not in a religious way, but in a Human way. We try. We fail.  We fall – hard.  But we get back up again. We brush off our emotional skinned knees and cover them with Grace.

Grace is being open to your humanness and accepting you as you are.  Grace is finding strength in your humanness. Accept your stumbles, it doesn’t require permission from anyone but you.

You are enough.

Grace is enough.

Trudi Lunnie-Thomas, BA, MA is a Life and Executive Coach for Woman on Fire Coaching and Consulting and Host of the Woman On Fire Radio. Her goal is to help her clients to disrupt the patterns established as part of their Status Quo, the habits, and limitations that control every part of their lives so that they can reclaim who they really are and how to live their lives to the fullest.  To continue the conversation, please come over to my blog at www.thearena.online. Thank you and go out and disrupt your Status Quo!