Sowing “Space for Grace”

What you sow you will reap.  This is a principle of God’s world both in the natural and in the supernatural.

My goal to “practice forgiveness” – regardless of how many opportunities come my way or how painful it is, when others’ “thorns” stick me – sometimes gets challenged.  Pain has a way of doing that.  But choosing humility, in the face of the testing, while it surely doesn’t feel good, it does give me a chance to experience the “taste of God’s grace” for I know without a doubt at that moment that I had just experienced “His strength allowing me to do all things.”

I pray for strength to love others, giving them grace on their bad days, not judging their mistakes with condemnation but with love, seeing their future instead of their mistakes.  By sowing those seeds of grace, perhaps, just perhaps, when I am having a bad day and my “thorn is throbbing” that they will give me grace, too, knowing that I am struggling to grow just like them.  By loving them today – even when they are unlovely, they will love me tomorrow – when my unlovely slips out.

Pay it forward, storing up for a rainy day, plan for the future – all are metaphors that can describe the concept of sowing for a harvest.  Sowing grace, giving “space for grace”, planting seeds of grace, means someday I get to taste grace for myself.

By controlling my reaction, by responding with kindness, patience, soft words – I can be “grace sower” instead of a sowing “hammers” – even when their thorns poke me and I bleed.

Isn’t it interesting, the place of greatest safety, the family, is also the place of the most opportunities to “practice forgiveness” and the most opportunities to “sow space for grace?”

#7 in my quest for revelation of The Great Commandment.  To read more on pursuing The Great Commandment, go to the next blog in this series, “Then Can I Say.”