I’m one of those people who believes that there are three sides to every story, yours, mine and the truth. Recently, I’ve come to realize and accept that, that really just means, there’s the story we tell ourselves and then there is the truth. A therapist might tell you that “feelings are not facts”. So if you find yourself in a situation and you have to tell your side of the story, challenge yourself to see if you can leave your feelings out of it and just state what happened.

Life in 2023 requires a certain level of awareness. It’s almost impossible to operate haphazardly through life without being aware of your surroundings, your feelings, your abilities, others and even yourself. There are so many movements that have happened over the last five or so years. Movements such as self-love, healing childhood and past traumas, self-awareness, soft life, podcast discussions and debates galore. With all of these things becoming more and more popular, a sense of self awareness is coming over us. We start to self diagnose or label and/or realize why we are who we are and why we do what we do or even have a better understanding of why we’ve done what we’ve done.

If we have adapted these new awareness’s into our growth journeys, the next best thing to do is to learn grace and apply it. It has been said that we are all a villain in someone else’s story but we rarely admit, accept and acknowledge where that may actually be true. It doesn’t mean that we are all bad people, it may just mean that we have not been as kind, nice, forgiving, open, understanding or loving as we could have been in a persons life. No one is perfect so we should accept that and only strive to be the best version of ourselves and Christ-like where we can.

When life doesn’t go our way and people don’t or won’t do as we would like them to, they become a bad person, when in reality, they only did a bad thing. One bad action doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you a person who did a bad thing. We have to learn to separate the two because now a narrative is put in place that an action has made them a bad person. Hence what happened, versus what we told ourselves. Grace needs to step in and separate the person from the action. Give grace to the situation and make sure to look into the core of the person versus an action that left a bitter taste in our mouths.

It goes without saying that one action versus habitual actions will play a factor in the grace we give others. If someone lied to you once, that one time does not constitute that person to be a liar, but if they have lied continuously and habitually, then a liar can be attached to their character. If you got into a disagreement with someone and you were already having a bad day, you may have told yourself that the other party was wrong. On the flip side, you may have bled on someone who didn’t cut you, and they reacted. Then the story you tell yourself is that this person is just the worst person ever because of how they responded in relation to how you treated them.

If grace is applied, you forgive yourself for having a bad day and you apologize to the person your bad day affected. You understand why and how they responded the way they did, without allowing the incident to dictate who they are or have been to you and your life.

These are just my thoughts.

Sincerely,

Angie