Infinite Grace

Last week, I talked about tactfully educating those who are “privacy oblivious” around us. This week, I want to pivot to something deeper that should inform how we do that work.

In Matthew 9:27-31, Christ healed two blind men knowing full well they would disobey His explicit command not to tell anyone about it.

He didn’t wait for them to prove their obedience first. He didn’t condition His Grace on their future behavior.

He healed them anyway, fully aware they’d spread the news throughout the district within hours.

What strikes me is that we ask Christ for pardon, peace, and forgiveness. We do our penance. We mean it... and Christ offers us infinite grace knowing, actually knowing, that our human nature will likely fail again.

We’ll stumble. We’ll fall short.

Yet His Grace is extended anyway.

As we move into the holidays and find ourselves around those who are still clueless about their digital privacy, their surveillance exposure, their data being harvested (people who will probably ignore their own admissions that things have gone too far, ignore our patient explanations, and go right back to their habits) we need to remember this example.

Extend the same infinite grace.

Speak truth tactfully, yes, but do not condition your kindness on whether they will actually change.

This is something I need CONSTANT reminders of, which is in part what inspired this post. As mentioned before, however, it will likely require God working dramatically in someone’s life to wake them up, if the past few years of insanity have not done so already.

Our goal is thus to simply keep spreading Truth in Love, and then trust God will work within His divine timeline to pull those around us over the finish line.

May God grant us the serenity to accept the things and people we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.