If what You See is All You See, You will Never See all there is to See.

What is Grace?
What is Kindness?
What is Love?

Why is it when those words are brought up the words that come to mind are judgment, abandonment, disillusion?
How can they be talked about so freely, then forgotten when it comes to living it out?

Grace is something given that is not deserved.  It's when someone deliberately forgets and makes a valid effort to see beyond their faults and failures.   It is standing in the gap, going the distance.  It's being there for a person even if you don't want to, or if they don't want you.  It's loving beyond your capacity, beyond your nature.  Can grace be something that comes naturally?  Can we get to the point where we go beyond judgment and discrimination naturally?  Can we develop a heart that can step outside of the filter of our own perspectives, out of our own life experiences, from our limited perception of the world?  Can we leave ourselves behind and live looking from eyes of grace?

Kindness is plainly love with it's work boots on.  It's so easy to be kind to our friends and the people we like.  Even people we don't know can easily receive kindness when suffering.  The real test is the people we don't like, the people that don't make us feel good about ourselves, and especially the people we don't notice. Those are the people where kindness is extra hard.  More often that not it's because we assume others will handle them or we just don't think about it at all.  These are the ones that need open eyes, open ears, open minds in order to even notice.  If we were really aware and unselfish, maybe we could see beyond fake smiles and forced laughter.  How many people sit in lonely crowded rooms.  Their tongues don't work but their minds are burning, screaming.  Closed mindedness goes hand in hand with ignorance.  I have a love/hate relationship with this word, ignorance.  It's easy, you can hardly be faulted, but it covers landmines, buries casualties.  Society is moving toward social justice, and people are opening their eyes globally to pain and suffering.  We are encouraged to hurry up and grow up so we can save the world, but it just excuses us from being active here, opening our eyes to the now. 

Love.  What is the opposite of love, hate or indifference?  Love is a verb, it's an action, a decision.  Love is changing.  When we love someone we make and effort to learn everything about them, their ins and outs, the way they think, they way they talk, the stuff they share and the secrets they don't.  We cater to their wants, desires, personality.  We do things specifically to make them happy.  We mold to fit, we shift to impress, we bend to help and die to save.  We'd hardly notice the change, but it happens.  As relationships strengthen, two begin to look more and more alike.  Isn't that what being a Christian really means?  If we love God, we would want to know Him, we would want what He wants, we would love what He loves, we would break over what breaks Him.  If we really search after God, we would look more like Him, more 'Christ-like'.