Learning grace is slow and hard the way recovery of any kind is usually slow and hard.

When a bone is broken or a muscle torn, no supply of godly wishing can speed the pace at which the healing happens. This moment’s not for optics, not for show: nothing less than patient, cellular recovery can make us whole again.

And so no project that contemplates the complete overhaul of our personal theology, the transformation of our hearts and minds, and the mending of our wounded relationships should be described as easy or expected in less than years or even decades. Hear the present, active tense of these amazing verbs:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Psalm 103:2-5).

We may sometimes be privileged to discern the day on which grace first began to heal us. But it will take millennia at least to help us comprehend the length and breadth and height and depth of grace beyond degree.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott

Ah, to be the wounded one—the one who gets to be the powerful forgiver. We covet this rare role because we’re usually more sinning than we’re sinned against. And when it comes our turn to show the grace once given us, we linger with the choice, as if it were a heavy thing to pardon what’s been done.

We can’t, of course, refuse forgiveness outright: Jesus tied our own forgiveness to the habit of forgiving. But first, a little groveling, we say. Some real contrition, perhaps a tear or ten. Some promises to never—ever—injure us again.

And so we fall far short of grace. We strike a lender’s bargain with the sinner: pardon only if the penitent submits to our superiority.

But grace is always washinbg someone’s feet—abandoning all power in the goal to make the sinner whole. We cannot—dare not—charge for what was freely offered us. If it’s not free, then it’s not grace.

Remind yourself of how forgiveness made you valuable to you.

And stay in grace. -Bill Knott

“Forgive me,” we say flippantly, painting on a shallow smile, when we discover we are misaligned with someone greater or more powerful—someone who might make us hurt.

We view our error lightly—just a minor inconvenience—and we hope the one offended will quickly do the same. Why do the humbling work of owning all that happened and acknowledging its impact?

But true forgiveness is a thoughtful, time-intensive mercy—never rushed if genuine; never brushed away if real. Unless we face the injury we’ve caused, we ask for restoration without repentance, a mere smoothing of ruffled surfaces. If the needed words are “I’m sorry that I hurt you,” or “I can see how I was wrong,” speak truthfully, and find the needed healing. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal 6:1-2).

And when we are the ones offended and it is our turn to forgive, we plant the seeds of our own future grudges if we pretend a painful hurt is only minor and dismissible. What goes unsaid is usually unforgiven as well. Both grace and truth are called for each time there is an injury.

Only those who know themselves forgiven by the One who was always “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14) ever truly forgive another broken soul. Only in the field of grace can reconciliation blossom.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knot