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From Karen Franklin, Food Pantry Coordinator and Healing Prayer Leader
Karen shared parts of this powerful reflection with the Pastoral Care Team as a devotional focus for our ministry team meeting and work
Conversations that rarely turn in your direction, moments where your needs are minimized, redirected or overlooked spaces where your presence is welcomed, but your weight is not and if you are not careful, you will begin to negotiate with yourself. Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe this is just how they are. Maybe I need to be more understanding.
Let’s be clear, Grace is not the absence of awareness. Grace does not require you to ignore patterns. It does not ask you to silent your needs. It does not demand that you remain in spaces that consistently fail to recognize your humanity, but Grace does ask something of you. It asked that you do not become hardened by what you have experienced, it asked that you do not repay limitations with limitation. It asked that you do not allow someone else’s incapacity to shape your character. Not everyone has the capacity to hold space; some people were never taught how to listen beyond themselves. Some have lived so long in survival that they cannot recognize presence unless it benefits them. Some are emotionally unavailable, not intentionally harmful but consistently limited, and if you misinterpret limitation as malice, you will carry unnecessary offense, but if you misinterpret limitation as something to tolerate indefinitely, you will carry unnecessary weight.
This is where Discernment must lead.
You can extend grace without extending access. You can remain kind without remaining available. You can understand someone’s limitation without positioning yourself to be impacted by it repeatedly. Grace is not proven by how much you endure, it is revealed in how you respond without losing yourself because the goal is not to become distant, cold or guarded, the goal is to remain whole. Scripture reminds us “above all else guard your heart for everything you do flows from it”(Proverbs 423) guarding your heart is not rejection. It is stewardship and sometimes stewardship looks like distance. Sometimes it looks like silence, sometimes it looks like no longer over extending yourself in spaces that have not shown the capacity to receive you well, you are not called to shrink your need for mutuality to preserve a connection. You are not called to perform emotional labor in environments that do not reciprocate. You are not called to prove your grace by tolerating imbalance.
You are called to love, but you are also called to wisdom. A wisdom knows the difference between extending grace and abandoning itself so yes, have grace but let it be grace that is anchored in truth. Let it be grace that is guided by discernment, let it be grace that protects your capacity to continue showing up in spaces that can actually hold you.
Karen
Taken from a Facebook postRef
Image courtesy Pixabay
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