You are sitting across a table from me at my favorite Starbucks.

I’m playing with the paper cover on my coffee cup. I’ve drank it all, almost, and I have just the bare little bit left to sip. I’m going to try to make it last.

You are holding your chai tea in both hands and you are listening to your own words as you share your story with me. It’s a journey that has twisted and turned, risen and fallen. There are doubts. There have been failings. There are hurts and wounds, and some of them are deep.

I’m nodding. I’m hearing you and I’m beginning to see who you really are. It’s beautiful and I’m thankful for you. We’ve invited each other into community.

Grace.

You have grace for me. I have grace for you.

It’s easy to give grace for people who need another chance, those who have come out of a dark corner into the center of the room, light shining in from a window. Grace for the second and third chances: it is becoming part of the spiritual journey of all of us.

You have to go. And so do I in a minute. I hug you goodbye and then with the ten minutes I have left before I pick up my four-year-old from preschool I open up my laptop.

I read your blog. Then I read a friend of mines. And then I cross over a blog that often riles me up. I read her post. I shake my head. She spews judgment and disguised hatred. She writes with an air of arrogance because HER way is RIGHT. Always. I know it’s not just me: I’ve heard other girls say that she makes them feel badly about themselves. She seems to desipse freedom and props up lists of rules as God.

I shake my head again, do not leave a comment {because what would I say?} and shut my computer.

For the fifteen minutes it takes to drive to the preschool I get angrier and angrier at her. I’ve never even met her but she makes me mad anyways. How can she propagate the open lack of grace for other people? How can she provide a place for others to YES her, pat her on the back and say, I agree? How, in 2010, can she actively show so little grace and so much judgment?

Amazing. I just do not understand.

But then, grace.

Just as much as I have been called to give grace to you, sitting across the Starbucks table from me, I have been called to show grace to her as well. If I do not, then I am as much of a grace-hater as she is.

Grace for a grace-hater?

That’s just too much to ask.

Not for Christ, who gave and gives grace for Pharisees {such as me}.

Dear blogger, who doesn’t even know me, please forgive me for not extending the grace to you that Christ has. I will do my best, with His power, to give you as much grace as I would want Christ to give to me. Thank you for helping me see my weaknesses.

Do you have trouble extending grace to those seem to hate grace themselves?

{Inspired by my real life coffee dates with some of you and by Mike Foster’s Graceonomics which I’m still only halfway through. You can buy it here.}