Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. | 1 Peter 4.8
There are a lot of people talking about grace: how to show grace to people struggling with this or that, victims of some sort of suffering. Often these conversations start to educate people, but turn into an introspective identification with the recipient. I have had numerous conversations with people who build up a definition of what grace look like and get frustrated when people don’t give them the love they deserve. Here is the rub: you don’t deserve grace.
The definition of grace is: unmerited favor; which means that you can never really expect it. In the Church, we would hope that people are mature and kind and treat one another as they would like to be treated. But they often don’t. There will be times in your life when people treat you without grace; sometimes they will even sin against you. It is in these times when we find out if we actually believe in grace. When others sin against us, it gives us the opportunity to be gracious. When people fail us, we are put in the place of deciding whether we are going to respond in kind, or if we are going to give them a forgiveness and love that they do not deserve.
We have the right to be the victim; to take on the identity of pain, but it does nothing for us. It traps us in a world of self-focus that makes us feel like we are continually being put in unfair situations. The gospel is the story about how we received grace: how we got what we do not deserve (relationship with God) and how we were protected from what we do deserve (punishment). This frees us from the trap of seeing grace as something that is kept from us, and allows us to see the whole world through what we have deserved. It is the only way to get outside of yourself so that you can love others recklessly, even beyond what they deserve.