Day 363: Hard Grace

I've actually been dancing around this particular Gratitude Attitude for the majority of the 365.  I keep turning hard grace over and over in my head and heart.  I keep thinking about how to put it into words that make some sort of sense.  Today I have decided hard grace isn't necessarily something that can be verbalized but usually it is lived, knowingly or unknowingly.  It is not easy to be grateful for the hard graces of life, in fact most of the time it is rather painful.  Hard grace is, well, hard. Its stripped down meaning is that in the hard there arrives and is present grace.  And to see the grace in the hard is the gift.  I feel like I have experienced some hard graces in my life but the fact is, I haven't.  Not really.  So perhaps that is why I keep turning it around and around, attempting to figure out how to be grateful for hard graces.  I think we all put conditions on what we can take.  And then when something happens that seems to be more than we can take and yet we push through I believe that is a hard grace.  For almost a year now I have been praying for a woman in my city who has four kiddos, a husband, and cancer.  Cancer that died down, got a little quiet, and then has made a reappearance, and this time it is putting up quite a fight.  Her story is the living definition of hard grace.  It's a kind of hard grace for me to be grateful for her willingness to share her story and hard graces. But I am grateful.  I'm grateful for her story and how she is living out her days because they challenge me in my days and my life.  Today, I'm asking you to go here and read about this woman's story of hard grace.