Many years ago my our family inherited a couple of goats, Prudence and Saphire.  We were renting a farmhouse and so we had a space for them to roam about in.  But we needed to purchase some alfalfa hay to augment what they could find to graze upon.

At that time we had some friends who raised sheep.  They had hay for sale so I drove our Pinto wagon out to their ranch to get a bale or two.  I will never forget the way the rancher, Lindy, tossed around those bales of hay.  It was one of the most graceful things I have ever seen.  There was no wasted movement, no wasted energy.  He made his work seem effortless.  Gravity seemed to be his friend and not his enemy.  It was as if the bales themselves had a deep-seated desire to align themselves in an orderly fashion and the rancher was simply making it possible for them to satisfy that desire.

Since that time I have observed a variety of skilled workers exhibit a high degree of gracefulness.  To develop this takes years of practice, a love of the work, and a knowledge of and care for the tools and the objects of the work.

Any important work is best done gracefully.  More work can be done because less energy is expended in each task.  Fewer errors and injuries occur because a graceful person works  together with his tools and resources; she has no enemies she is working against (even time is her friend).  Gracefulness leads to beauty in the product and joy in the working.

For many years I have been encouraging fellow Christians to seek to be gracious and graceful as an outgrowth of our belief in the grace of God.  We live in and by and for grace.  If Christians aren’t both gracious and graceful we have not really understood the grace of God, we do not really trust in that grace.

Over these years I have found it easier to picture graciousness than to picture gracefulness.  Today, as I think about Lindy and those bales of alfalfa hay, I can see it a bit more clearly.

A gracious person asks, as Jesus did, “What do I want others to do for me?,” and then does that for them.  As we continue to ask this question and then put it into practice, we better understand what we humans truly and deeply desire; and we learn how to fulfill those desires.

Learning how to be gracious is the beginning of becoming graceful; gracefulness in the christian life comes after years of practice being gracious.  As we learn to love being gracious we become more and more graceful.  When we care for the tools of this trade, kindness, compassion, generosity, empathy, truth, gentleness, listening, celebration, courage and many more, the grace of God seems to flow through us.  The more importance we give to knowing the people we are working with, the easier it becomes to be gracious.  Slowly, the enemies we struggled against in order to act gracious, begin to fade away, jealousy and envy, taking offense and taking sides, seeking praise or credit, avoiding pain or vulnerability.

It is even more difficult to live gracefully than to toss hay bales gracefully.  But then again, we believe that we always go with the grace of God.