It’s a choice, this most courageous way of living.

The choice to choose to notice grace and yeah, be amazed.

And it’s amazing, really, that it’s that simple and that hard.

What it really takes is opening up the eyes and noticing grace in the middle of the messiness of life, choosing to live in the only real moment that we have – the moment of now – and choosing to pluck from the wonders that surround us that pearl of peace that’s always there.

Choosing grace means choosing now, choosing to see, choosing to be amazed.

It’s every day, this grace I’m discovering, uncovering, and finding in the most unlikely of places.

It’s showing up in things like birds chattering in the trees in the early morning, in the sudden shower that drenches me as I dash from car to door in the summer rain, in shoulders that are strong and offered up for a drenching of tears when I’m at the end of my rope and the end of hope.

Grace, I’m discovering, isn’t something that happens in the flash of lightning or the peal of thunder or the big promotion or the big win.

Grace is much more subtle than that. She’s quiet, maybe even shy. Always there and always simply waiting to be found, seen, noticed.

For a lot of years I was too busy to notice. Too busy looking for happiness and joy and just a little peace, please, which I suppose is what we’re all looking for. The elusive joy of life. Peace which passes understanding. Happiness in this vale of tears.

But it’s hard enough to find matches for all the socks that come out of the dryer, never mind finding joy and peace and anyway when you’re in the middle of life it all feels too busy to do much real looking, because real searching-for-peace doesn’t happen in the middle of making dinner or making the bus or making the beds. Real searching for peace happens when you get away from it all. At least that’s what I thought for a lot of life – that life needs to just pause itself so that grace can be found.

This isn’t the case at all.

Grace doesn’t live outside of real life. It’s tucked right into it, in the spaces and places and people, like a perfect little pearl waiting to be discovered.

Waiting for me to choose to notice.

~xo,
LuAnne