Grace. How many times have you heard someone say, “By the Grace of God go I,” or you said it pondering your situation?
I used to say it quite frequently when I was working at a women’s prison here in Canada. It would come to my lips as well later when I transferred to a men’s facility.
By now it is obvious that storytelling is my thing. Love to hear others’ journeys and freely share my own if I feel it will help even one. So unlike some, I would sit on a pod for hours, this is where four to five inmates lived on the maximum-security unit and listened to their stories. Story after story, I would be nodding and whispering “by the Grace of God go I.”
By Grace
It could easily have been me incarcerated on one of those pods. You could have been the one hearing my story of how I stabbed the last man who put his hand in my panties at 12 years old. Twenty-five to life they would have given me had I followed a popular saying by Jamaican women.
When pushed to the limit, I have heard on numerous occasions my mother or other aggrieved women saying, “I will t’row hat oil inna him ears!” (Message me for translation – lol). How many times I have thought to do just that after being slapped, punched and beaten by a former husband. By the Grace of God, I restrained myself.
Flat broke, sleeping on a half-blown up mattress on the floor with one tin of sardines and a half-pound of flour in the cupboard for food, wondering whether I could make it through this time. Then, by the Grace of God, a few thousand dollars was transferred to my account from an agency that I thought would not pay me.
Grace – What Is It
What is this “Grace?” Believers are of the opinion that “Grace” is God’s favour to undeserving sinners and/or is a special blessing. Personally, my appreciation of grace has evolved from that elementary understanding.
Grace is available, freely flowing to all of us. Believers and nonbelievers of any or all religious or spiritual paths.
Grace is Love. Grace is the natural order of Life.
We fall out of Grace or out of sync with this natural flow of life through our thoughts and actions that say we are undeserving of our greatest good. Some of us have been spoon-fed these thoughts and notions. We kept repeating them to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, to the point that they have blocked our alignment with Life.
Take my experience of being broke mentioned earlier. For all my childhood years, my mother fed me a diet of poverty, unworthiness, the envy of others and all thoughts associated with such notions. As I said many times to me our life was okay. However, hearing how bad things were and how much it was due to me often enough, it sunk in.
Aligning Yourself
No matter how successful I was, it was never enough. The race against poverty and the Joneses was a long and challenging one. It took rock bottom for me to finally start cleaning up and throwing out those tapes.
Aligning myself with Life/Source/God without any particular religious path has seen Grace being a constant presence in my life.
Grace is Authenticity – ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ ~ Jesus according to the gospel of Thomas. It is when you authentically acknowledge your feelings and thoughts. Grace welcomes all feelings and, paradoxically, liberates you from the impulse to act on feelings that serve anything less that the highest good.” Art of Grace
In Grace, we all live move and have our beings. Once we awaken to this – this free-flowing ‘blessing’, the Order of Life – our life experiences are nothing short of what we tend to call “miracles.”
Blessings,
