Grace of Angels

I chose that title for a reason. I've been around just long enough now to understand a few things, things I wish I'd gotten my head around years ago. Here's one of them.

Lack of hardship makes soft people. My grandparents and my parents lived through the Great Depression and WWII. My great-uncle's family lived in a big city during those years, and he recalled many times when he went to bed hungry. Food was never far from his mind the rest of his life. Compared to them, anything I've gone through is minor by comparison.

Because they'd been tested and they had endured, these folks moved through their later lives with a grace that has almost been lost today. Minor troubles were brushed away with a wrinkle of the nose and a dismissive gesture that said more loudly than words, "This is nothing...not worth the time to think about."

These are the people who, while suffering heart attacks and other life-threatening maladies, told their loved ones to request the ambulance come for them without sirens because they "...didn't want to wake the neighbors."

They were stronger, bigger, and more blessed than I can ever be, because they knew how to brush off life's negatives and enjoy life's positives.

I look around me today, at kids who are furious because their parents won't give them the money to buy new ring tones, at parents who ignore their kids and then blame the schools for failing them, at many other sad, graceless things...and I wonder if I am the last of my kind-someone who remembers some of the best of our past, and who tries to imitate it.

I know there are holdouts out there. I meet them occasionally, on the internet, in real life, in a news story about a rare hero, and it gives me hope. Maybe there will always be those who carry grace inside of us. We hold the door for an elderly woman instead of mocking her behind her back, we yield to the pushy driver without feeling the need to throw out our middle finger, we jump to help a stranger even if it puts us in danger. We take what life deals us, and we do the best we can with it, without complaint or bitterness.

That's the kind of person I want to be. And it's why I chose "Grace of Angels" as my blog title. I want to remember the grace of the forgotten angels, and bring it back to life.