When I started training to run a half marathon and hopefully a marathon next year, I decided to write about it in a series called Lace Lessons. I was on a family vacation when I wrote my first post, and my nieces and nephews helped me brainstorm different titles for posts within the series. We came up with a lot, including ‘Pace Lessons’, ‘Race Lessons’ and ‘Grace Lessons’.  I was looking forward to the Grace Lessons post because being new at anything requires a certain amount of grace as you accept the fact that you may have a very long road ahead of you before you figure out how to do things, and do them well.

Today, however, I can’t use this title for a post on running, because we need it for a much larger issue. I am utterly dismayed over what is happening in our country right now. I am not going to get political. I’m too uninformed on the subject and I don’t want to fight. I’m not proud of how little I know about current affairs and politics, especially in light of the fact that I am surrounded by people who feel passionately about politics and seem to have a deep understanding of the intricacies of what’s happening in our nation as well as in our world. If you lose respect for me because I am politically inactive, I accept that, and hope that you will continue to read despite my passivity in this area.

What I am wondering is where the grace is in our world. How did we get to this place where protesting in favor of white supremacy and smashing a Holocaust memorial in Boston seem like good, productive things to do? Do people really believe that chaos will bring solutions? If so, how? And, why? Is there truly no other way to have a conversation about these heated topics other than through violence?

What we need in our world right now is more grace. More acceptance. More patience. More understanding. More willingness to stop talking or shouting so that we can actually stop to listen. More self-awareness and more self-restraint. More compassion. More focus on what each of us can do to help improve the world instead of pushing it further along this path of destruction. More tolerance for differences, whether they are religious, political, sexual, racial or economic. It all begins within each of us and the decisions we make as to how we act and react. We have the power to change, we just need to trust that taking a path that is more respectful of others can exceed any results that come from violence.

Praying for peace and progress…