Grace

There's been a recurring word in my life lately: grace. I keep hearing other people talking about extending it. And I keep realizing that I need to extend it to myself.

I've always been a very goal-oriented person. I make to-do lists and set goals and feel this tremendous pressure to accomplish the lists and goals when I've planned to.

But sometimes, life happens. Sometimes, work is stressful and I need to realize that the world won't end if I don't get around to vacuuming under the couch cushions this month.

God's already given me his grace - now he's teaching me to extend it to myself. And lately he's been teaching me by way of necessity. Too little time, and stuff has had to go. This weekend I had a whole slew of things on my list...and then all of a sudden today my body was overcome with achy-ness, probably the beginning of sickness.

But as I look at my list, I've realized once again that the world won't end if I don't do everything on it. Even if I don't do anything on it. We - women especially, I think - place the world on our shoulders and sometimes, we lose sight of what's really going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

I set some goals last night for writing my novel. I set a reasonable goal of how many words to write each week. But I specifically wrote on my plan - "with grace." I've built into my plan 4 extra weeks beyond what would be needed if I meet that word count each week. Because I know that sometimes, I'll need to skip a week or go low on my word count. And I want to build grace into my writing plan.