Grace race

The bulk of our company's IT work is outsourced to India. They're quick, responsive, but pretty hard to understand on the phone. I've been having an awful time getting a vital computer to print and have been working with Sudhakar for days on this issue.

He's very innovative--he sets up a notebook pad on the computer in question and we message back and forth--he'll ask me to try some things on my end, watches the result, and then tries something else. I like him, he does his best to explain things clearly and I have real motivation to get this issue resolved. I figure that since we're both committed to fixing this, we might as well be a team.

It's not always like that for them. I hear a lot of complaints about how hard they are to understand with their thick Indian accents and I've heard a few of them get an earful from people who are frustrated. I wonder if it colors their opinion of Americans.

As of yesterday afternoon, the issue remained a mystery. When it was pushing 6 o'clock I needed to get some other things done so we had to end the session. Sudhakar wrote to thank me for my patience and I wrote back that he was great---innovative and creative, and it was good to work with him. He didn't say it, but I could tell that I might have been a rare voice of calm on the other end of his customer service list.

What I wrote next seemed to impact him. It was a simple, "Grace is a gift, my friend." At that point the words on the screen paused as he seemed to ponder it---then he wrote back, "Yes it is Danny".

Grace is unmerited favor. We don't deserve the break. I try to offer grace in various places and it totally blows me away when someone who expects to be yelled at or given a hard time doesn't receive what they might have had coming. When I recieve it, I'm always highly aware of the gift.

I'm a bicycle commuter. Two weeks ago I was in the downtown portion of my ride, mixed in with cars. I was alongside a van that had just dropped off someone and the driver pulled back into traffic as I was alongside her. Had she kept going she would have knocked me down. Instead, I reached over and tapped (not banged) on her side view mirror.

A block later we both came to a stoplight. She rolled her window down and called out, "I'm sorry". I smiled at her. "It's ok", I offered, "I've done it myself." Grace. She could have sat at the light staring straight ahead but she asked for forgiveness. I could have been a knob and reminded her of what she did.

I receive grace as well. On my Saturday ride, we (kind of/sort of) rolled through a stop sign causing a car to brake. The driver was totally within her rights to lay on the horn and remind us for the idiot bike riders we were at the moment. She didn't. She gave us grace.

Goes both ways. Offer earthly grace today in humble reverence for the heavenly grace we recieve every day from above.