Amazing Grace

 Grace? She died thirty years ago.

One of my favorite bits from the holiday classic National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is when hard-of-hearing Great Aunt Bethany is asked to say grace for the family meal. She misunderstands what people are saying to her and responds with the above quote, thinking they're asking after an old friend. When it's finally conveyed to her that she should say the blessing, she stands up and recites the Pledge of Allegiance. The rest of the family throws in the proverbial napkin and joins in. The word play, coupled with the back and forth between Aunt Bethany and her cantankerous husband, never fails to bring a smile to my face. I recently noticed, though, that the same quote could be used to describe modern society.

Grace is not a word that comes up in conversation much anymore. Occasionally we'll use it to describe someone who moves elegantly. A little more often, we might talk about a grace period, usually in connection to how many days we can go past a loan payment due date without paying a penalty. Even asking Great Aunt Bethany to pray before eating seems to be a thing of the past. Someone bringing up the Biblical kind of grace? For me at least, unheard of outside of sermons at the aptly named Grace United Methodist Church.

But what exactly is the Biblical kind of grace? It's something that comes up pretty often throughout scripture. Grace shows up in the Psalms, the Proverbs and the Prophets. It gets mentioned over 100 times throughout the New Testament. Sometimes lips are anointed with grace. Sometimes we stand in grace. Usually grace is given to us by God, but we are also told to give grace to others. Biblical grace is a state of being where we have found favor with God. My interpretation of that is this: God loves us, he wants to be in a relationship with us and is willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and put up with our flaws in order to maintain that relationship. He gives us grace so that we have a safe place to make mistakes, learn from them and grow into better people. Without grace, the moment we said or did something stupid or selfish (or in many cases, both), the relationship could be broken and we would be lost.

 

Grace is a tough concept for some of us to accept. We don't feel worthy of receiving it. Maybe because, in our own minds, our flaws are too big. Or we've done something that just can't be forgiven. Or our bad habits are too ingrained to be changed. Or (insert the toxic thought you think about yourself most often). The good news about about the grace we receive from God, is that there isn't anything we have to do (or not do) in order to get it. He gives us another helping every morning to help us get through the day. Whether we think we deserve it or not. Whether we want it or not. Whether we think we even need it or not. (Spoiler alert: every single one of us does.)

 

So, if God gives us daily doses of His grace how are we supposed to respond to each other in the same way? Since I can sense some of you wanting to raise your hand with a question or two, now would be a good time to mention some things that grace is not. Grace is not a tolerance of evil. Grace does not mean putting up with abuse. Grace can go hand in hand with forgiveness but is not the same thing, even though both contain an element of accountability. Grace is not necessarily about kindness but can be the pathway to being more kind. 

Extending grace to others is also not something that comes easily to me. Luckily for all of us, I've come up with another acronym to make it easier to do:

Give Radical Attention to Connect with Everyone

What does radical attention mean? All it really means is that we need to take a few seconds and actually pay attention to the people around us. Which, in today's stare-at-our-phones-for-17-hours-a-day culture is a pretty radical concept. Before flying off the handle in any given situation (a condition I am constantly working on), pause for a moment, consider that you know literally nothing useful about the cashier/server/driver/toll taker/stranger in an elevator/roller skate wearing teenager/whoever standing in front of you, realize that you are not the first interaction that they have had today and (wait for it): BE NICE! 

The simple fact is that most people just want to be recognized as existing without being dumped on for, well, existing. Anyone who has ever been in a customer service position can tell you that a huge chunk of the people who are complaining to you don't even really want a refund or a new product or anything other than for you to listen to their complaint. The key to those interactions though, is that you have to sincerely give them your undivided, radical attention. And I get it. Paying attention to the world around you can be exhausting. But, frankly, so can being a crab all the time (and I am really good at being a crab). I even have an example of how giving radical attention to connect with everyone made a night out better recently.

Several nights ago, my wife and I decided that neither of us were in the mood to cook dinner. We (finally) agreed on Chinese food. We headed off to a restaurant she had been to before but I had not. When we got there, the place was hopping. Several people were waiting for to-go orders and about two-thirds of the tables were occupied. It took a couple of minutes for a gentleman to meet us at the front counter and take us back to a table. He dropped off some menus, took our drink order and scurried away. We looked over the menu, made our choices and waited. And waited some more. Then we looked around to see if we could catch the eye of a server, did not see anyone and waited more. At that point, more than twenty minutes had gone by since we sat down.

I fully admit that the situation so far would frequently have my freakishly low blood pressure rising and a red haze settling over everything I saw. I think a larger percentage of people would take the same position every year that goes by. We would declare the service to be atrocious, storm out, maybe write a nasty review online somewhere and make weird guttural sounds in the back of our throats if anyone mentioned the place in our presence. Then, even hangrier than we were twenty minutes ago, we would have to find somewhere else to eat and start the whole cycle over again. Luckily, I've been working on my cranky attitude a bit lately and we chose a different route.

We had been having a pleasant conversation while waiting but it petered out just enough for us to start hearing snippets of dialog from the tables around us. This not only gave us the opportunity to make a few quiet jokes about what other people were talking about, but also forced us to shift our focus from our table to the restaurant at large. That is when we noticed there was only two people serving the entire restaurant, including the pick-up orders. And those two people were not only running their butts off but were doing it unflappably. Within moments of this shift on our part, the gentleman stopped by our table with drinks and took our food order. I'm not actually sure how long we waited for our food. Because we chose to extend some grace, we simply enjoyed some people watching. A woman eventually hustled up to our table with our plates, apologized for the wait, which we assured her was okay, and charged back to the kitchen for another table's food.

The food we ate that night was, hands down, some of the best Chinese food I've ever had. The crab rangoons tasted like they had just been put together (as busy as they were they very well may have) and the orange chicken was awesome. If we hadn't chosen grace, we would have missed out. True, we wouldn't have known we missed out but often it's what you don't know that hurts you. Or something like that. But wait, there's more. Since we were in such a good mood after our feast, we decided to take a walk and visit the rest of the businesses along the strip mall. As we approached the far end, we discovered a Brazilian bakery where we purchased some delicious sweet rolls and the delightful proprietor insisted we have some cheese rolls on the house. Those were the lightest, fluffiest cheese flavored baked goods I've ever had the pleasure to run across my taste buds. We will absolutely visit both places again and I'm betting my waistline will give evidence to our patronage.

So there you have it. An evening that could have been mediocre at best or a total disaster leaving both of us disgruntled and weary, became delightful because we remembered that we'd been given a healthy heaping of grace and chose to pass some of it on. And let's be honest, if we had chosen to storm out, that restaurant would have been just fine. Our leaving would have lightened their load for the night but, frankly, added to ours. While paying attention to the people around us does sometimes take energy we might not feel like we have, giving people grace seems to make the energy we do have go a whole lot further. And that is some good we could all use in the midst of the world's chaos.