A few days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about a mutual friend who had fallen from grace. I have talked about grace before, in the height of the pandemic grace is something that occupies my mind quite a bit. In today’s society when I think about grace, I think about how it so easy to fall from grace, but often very very hard to get up again.

This idea of getting up, or rising from this fall is something that for the last couple of months I have wondered about. What does a fall from grace look like, how does one fall and how do you begin to try to rise? These questions and other peppered my conversations in the last two weeks. I have been thinking about friends that have fallen from grace and I think about how they must feel, the shame, the sense of loss and the isolation that feels like.

Grace is something of an ethereal thing. It is something we possess, we receive and we give. You can’t truly define because it can show up in some many ways, but when you see grace you know it and feel it.

So it is very troubling to think that our grace is something we can lose. I don’t believe we can lose our grace. I think we can fall from our grace for sure and getting up after that fall can be very hard. However, I think if we really are remorseful and ready to rise again, though hard, this is achievable.

How do people get to this fall? For some or most people who fall, some traumas are so deep and are so scarring, that all the bearer often see is the pain. These lasting traumas also create a sense that we are not in control of our actions. We begin to experience life in this form of out of body experience where our pain takes over our hearts. We allow our hurts takes over and we begin to hurt others and we begin to live in that pain, we begin in that moment of pain and everything else cascades around it.

These deepening traumas trigger us so much that we forget that pain is temporary. And even though traumas run deep in the scars stay on our skin telling their story of pain. We can decide what story should be told. If it’s a story of pain or if it’s a story of grace. If it’s a story of how we lived in trauma. But walked through that trauma to the other side. The decision we make can allow us to show more grace because we understand what it is like to fall from it. I think that’s the reason people struggle to show grace to others because they just they themselves have never fallen from it. They haven’t understood the kind of trauma that leads to that kind of fall.

When people ask me what I learnt when the pandemic, or as people like to call it these days the Panasonic, is over: I want to be able to say I learned how to fall so I could learn to rise and help people rise too. I want to be able to say I tried to be better every day. I want to say that though there were traumas that felt like they would break me forever. I got up and I talked myself into getting up every day. I learned to show grace, I learned to receive grace and though I made many mistakes and I will keep on making mistakes as I go. I trusted myself to try to do better every day.

I think of the end of the day, that’s the best we can ask and all that the best we can ask of anyone. Traumas and all.