It occurred to me today that I need to choose grace more often.

We should default to grace, instead of to judgment. Why? Because we don’t know the whole story. We don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives. Even when we think we know, because we believe ourselves to be close to a particular person, we don’t really know. And so, whatever story is behind whatever it is that people around you are doing, you should chose grace.

A couple of years ago, I had a friend that we will call Tyler. This friend and I weren’t terribly close, but we were friends. Tyler committed suicide. In the moments immediately after his death, we were all scratching our heads and wondering why and wanting to ask the questions for which there are no answers. But, as the hours and days turned into weeks and months, we started to discover many of the contributing factors that lead Tyler to a place of absolute despair and darkness. Many of these factors were a mystery to Tyler’s own wife and children. Even they, who certainly would have thought that they knew Tyler, were unaware of the story that lead him to that most desperate of choices.

So, choose grace. You don’t know the whole story.

That guy who cut you off on the highway on your way in to work was just told by his wife that she is filing for divorce and he is trying to get in to work as fast as he possibly can just so he can close the door to his office and bury himself in his work to keep from having to deal with the awful reality of his life.

That woman at the grocery store, the one that saw you going for the last loaf of bread on the rack and took it right out from under you, has three children at home who haven’t eaten for three days and the loaf she took is the only one that she can afford with the money that she has and she needs that bread for her children to be able to make sandwiches for their lunches.

That dude that left the negative comment on your social media post was fired today by his boss because he found out that the boss and the boss’s secretary are sleeping together and the boss doesn’t want anyone to know so he got fired for no reason at all and he took it out on you online.

–> Now, let’s be honest, if you’re anything like me, even in the above situations, you felt it was necessary to pass a little judgment. I think we are programmed to do it at some point. Sometimes, it’s so automatic for me and it shouldn’t be.

Regardless, choose grace. You don’t know the whole story.

Additionally, another reason for choosing grace is this: you make a bad judge. Here’s why:

Humans are constantly in an emotional flux which is the result of all manner of different things (for example –> when you last ate, what level of satisfaction you are getting from your love life, the levels of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in your bloodstream, how successful you feel at work, the relative volatility of your circumstances, how much sleep we got last night, etc., etc., etc.), some of which we can control and other factors that are beyond us. This emotional flux causes us to look at things differently at different points in time, even when we are considering different situations that are relatively similar. In fact, it is probably unreasonable to expect that a person, without some set of guidelines, would ever be able to judge the same situation similarly at different points in time, since it is highly unlikely that the myriad of factors that are part of the equation that adds up to our emotional state, would ever be the same twice.

But, since most of us are unaware of the fact that we happen to be very different people, emotionally speaking, at different points in time, we imagine that we are perfectly capable of passing judgment on others. But, it’s simply not true. What you might consider egregious one day could just be inappropriate on a different day.

Finally, one of the best reason for choosing grace is this –> it’s what you would want people to do to you.

And don’t try to lie by telling me that you wouldn’t want that at all. Don’t pretend that you would want people to disregard your circumstances in their decisions to pass judgment on you. No one likes to be judged, and we certainly don’t like it when the person passing judgment on us doesn’t have all of the facts.

To sum up, there isn’t enough grace in the world. I am certainly to blame when it comes to being quick to judge others. Instead, we should offer the grace to our fellow humans that we would want them to offer to us in the complicated circumstances of our lives.