This article was inspired by a slip of tongue. I stumbled walking into class yesterday and some guy made a wise remark about how "gracious" I was. "I like to think I am gracious, actually," I retorted, "but the word you're looking for is graceful." "Same thing," he mumbled, and I spent the rest of the class pondering how truly different the two are.
Nobody is graceful, when you really think about it. We're all trying to make it through life, stumbling as we go, making mistakes, goofing up. To be graceful is to have finesse, to be so skilled in some area that you make it look easy. In life, we simply aren't made for that. Sure, one can be a graceful athlete, or a graceful speaker, or even a graceful writer, but "graceful" defines elegance of action.
"Gracious," on the other hand, defines elegance of spirit. Gracious people seek to make their hearts kind and pure, putting others before themselves and forgiving those who wrong them. Gracious people keep their lives gentle, merciful and just. Gracious people help when they don't have to, show respect when they don't need to, and give when they don't want to.
Gracious people are not graceful.
Or at least, at some point they weren't. To be graceful is to have it all together. Graceful people don't make mistakes. The most compassionate people are compassionate because they have likely been in a place in their life where they needed compassion more than anything else. A very gracious woman once told me, "We show grace because we have had grace shown to us." Gracious people are quite possibly the ones who have stumbled the most.
Gracious is when your mom saves you the last cupcake when she could have eaten it and you'd have never known. Gracious is the girl who is nice to everyone regardless of their social status. Gracious are the teachers who went above and beyond every day to make high school suck a little less for you. Gracious are the classmates who study with you even when they don't need to, because they're rooting for you as much as they are for themselves. Gracious people understand that candles lose nothing by lighting other candles. Gracious people are gracious when no one else is looking.
I haven't yet decided if graciousness is innate, though. I'd like to believe it is, but I'm often just not sure. I am impatient, jealous, and sometimes spiteful, but I do my very best to live a gracious life. I fail, I embarrass myself, I cry. I am probably the least graceful human you will ever meet, but only when we own our insecurities can we begin to overcome them. And overcoming this insecurity is deciding that I don't care.
I don't care if I'm graceful. I just want to be gracious.
