My friend Vince Vanderveen has a wonderful teaching on having the grace to not take offense when we are wronged. He uses an illustration of two people walking down narrow perpendicular blind alleys and bumping into each other at the intersection. If we were one of those people, we could easily become upset that this person bumped into us. “Watch where you are going! Didn’t you see me?... That hurt!”

However, Vince says that if the person who bumped into us was carrying a big box that didn’t allow him to see us, we may still be initially upset that they bumped into us, but we would understand why they bumped into us. 

Vince says that we are often just one piece of information away from understanding why people hurt us. If we could see…