Learning to walk is no joke. There’s far more failure than success, particularly at the beginning.   

As I’ve been watching my son toddle around, I’ve learned a lot.

Tiny humans have this instinctual propensity to fall well. Not always, of course, but on the whole, they go from attempting to take steps to falling in one relatively graceful motion.

Toddlers do not agonize over each fall and failure. They probably spend essentially no brain energy on each fall other than to figure out how to get back up again. Because they are so short, they have a small distance to go before hitting the ground.

The grace to fall matches their season. 

I think our need for grace increases with our height - easy for me to say as a 4’11’’ woman, I know. Perhaps it’d be better to say our need for grace increases with age. Adults are both literally and figuratively taller than toddlers which means we fall farther. The farther we have to fall, the harder we may land. 

The stakes may go up with our season. More may ride on our ability to learn and execute than those gloriously simple times of learning to walk, but I think there is still grace to match the season.

As we get older, we need more grace, not less, to fall. We need to embrace what it looks like to have the fluid motion from failure, to grace, to getting back up and walking again. It may not apply to walking any longer, maybe it’s more to do with success in a job, or relationship, or finances, but there is grace to meet the need.

That’s not to say there aren’t some falls that leave a mark. Much like toddlers have the occasional cry-inducing head bonk, some failures touch us on a deeper level that requires more comfort and encouragement before we’re ready to get back up again. We need someone to wipe our tears and acknowledge it was hard, just as my son needs to be held on occasion before he recovers from a fall.

Regardless, our adult failures may be and feel more potent, but the portion of grace available to us is sufficient. 

The grace we’re extended has an exponential growth to it.

What a relief. There is grace to fall, no matter our age.