While driving in traffic.

When you’re right, but they don’t know it.

On your birthday.

In your area of expertise.

When you’re running late.

When they’re doing it wrong.

While pregnant.

When you’re overlooked.

When the telemarketer calls.

At the DMV.

I know that grace is far more than biting my tongue when I want to lash out, more than not saying mean things, more than tolerating someone who is intolerable, more than just being nice, more than a tight-lipped patience. Grace is extending more than what is deserved and that never starts with me. Because that? Is impossible.

If I really believe this grace changes everything, then the secret to a life transformed is simple – receive the grace given to you in abundance, then pour it out on everything. And it isn’t fake, this outpouring of grace in the midst of the impossible. Being a hypocrite is not acting contrary to how you feel. Being a hypocrite is acting contrary to who you are. In Christ, you are graceful. Even when you don’t feel like it.

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them — yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

1 Corinthians 15:10