Who Do You Allow to Sit at Your Table? –How changing seats changed my perspective on grace.

Sometimes the roots beneath our relationships are not as healthy as we think they are.

 Sometimes what looks like discernment is actually fear.
Sometimes what looks like wisdom is actually distance.
Sometimes what looks like righteousness is quietly rooted in pride, assumptions, or   judgment.
 

And sometimes we do not recognize it until life places us on the other side of the table.

I grew up in church, and I genuinely loved God. My dad was a pastor, and faith shaped so much of my childhood. But somewhere along the way, I unknowingly developed a perfection mindset — one that tied goodness to performance and approval. I often behaved well not only out of love for God, but out of fear of rejection, fear of mistakes, or fear of disappointing the people around me.

And because I worked so hard to appear “right,” I slowly began forming quiet judgments in my heart about people whose lives looked different from mine.

I was surrounded by environments where external behavior was sometimes emphasized more heavily than internal pain. Conversations occasionally focused more on the attire hurting people wore into the sanctuary than the wounds they carried through the doors.

Without realizing it, some of those roots made their way into my own heart.

I never intentionally wanted to push someone away from Christ, but it breaks my heart now to think about the way I once viewed people through such shallow filters. Dirty jeans. A secular song playing through someone’s speakers. The lines of a tattoo. A messy past. A lifestyle I did not understand.

I confused external appearance with spiritual condition.

But life has a way of humbling us.

Pain has a way of softening hard places.

And over time, God began showing me something I could not fully understand before: compassion grows deeper when you realize how desperately you need grace too.

Jesus never looked at broken people and asked whether they appeared polished enough to deserve a seat near Him.

He sat with sinners.

He touched lepers.

He defended the ashamed.

He pursued the rejected.

Jesus never saw dirty jeans, tattoos, addiction, divorce, doubt, or failure as reasons someone could not sit at His table.

And honestly, I am grateful He didn’t. 

Because eventually, I became someone who desperately needed that same kind of mercy. 

I remember the moment the news of my divorce leaked out into the church.

It was such an intimate detail of my life, and somehow I already knew that telling other people would add to the depths of pain that already felt too hard to navigate.

There were certain foundational pillars of my life — youth pastors, Sunday School teachers, worship leaders — that went completely silent after finding out.

The noise that eventually came through was deafening.

Instead of approaching a wounded heart with gentleness and curiosity, much of what arrived came through misunderstanding, assumption, and painful speculation.

Most of the texts I received came from a place of shock because I had kept the emotional and mental struggles I faced during the final moments of my marriage quiet in an attempt to preserve whatever dignity we had left.

Somehow, it didn’t work.

What seeped its way into the text threads and conversations included accusations that could not have been farther from the truth.

What I realized then was that in trying to preserve our dignity through silence, there was no voice louder than the accusations being spoken for me.

I had a choice in that moment. 

I could fight every lie being spoken against me with rage and bitterness… 

or I could remain quiet and steadfast in what I knew to be true.

I chose to let the truth speak for itself.

I survived by pulling that truth tightly to my chest and letting it lead the way into the room.

It was a very difficult fight, but it is one I would choose all over again.

I watched friends walk away because they believed the lies.
I watched extended family members turn the other way when I walked into the room.
I felt the gut-wrenching glares that were once smiles in my direction.

 It was tough.
I felt alone.
I felt misunderstood.

One thing I realized from the other side of the table is that when I felt my chair being pushed the farthest away was actually when I most needed someone to pull it closer.

I needed just one person to pull up a chair beside me and say with gentleness, “It’s okay. You can sit here. I know who you are, and I want to hear your side of the story.”

I questioned my faith because the people causing so much pain were once the same people sitting beside me in church pews and teaching my Sunday School classes.

I held onto my faith by my fingernails and a prayer.

 I kept walking through the church doors for my daughter.
I kept smiling in the face of people I knew were talking behind my back.
Because I knew the Truth.

I was not perfect in that season. 

Pain rarely leaves anyone untouched. 

I carried a lot of sin and a lot of scars. 

But eventually, it got easier.

A few people started looking me in the eyes again.
After a while — a long while, actually — I noticed some began asking how I was doing.

Sometimes, even now, I still feel that strange tightening rise in my throat. 

The feeling that wonders what someone thinks about me or what they believe they know.

And in my very next breath, God pulls my chair close to His table and gently whispers the truth that I am His.

And my heart finds peace again in that knowing.

In His unfathomable love for me.

2 Corinthians 5:19 says, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed the message of reconciliation to us.”

I will never forget reading that passage on the other side of this pain.

 I found freedom there.

Freedom from my past.
Freedom from my own failures and mistakes…
but also freedom from holding onto the mistakes of others.

 I found forgiveness.

  For them.
  For me.
  For all of us.

Pain is a really difficult thing.

Wounds are real and deep… and sometimes wounds seep while they are still trying to heal.

1 Peter 2:24 says Jesus bore our sins in His body on the cross, and by His wounds we have been healed.

I am proof. 

And that is my Truth:

He bears my sins. 

He heals my wounds. 

It feels a little crazy to say this now, but I would not go back to who I was before that experience.

It taught me compassion and empathy.

It taught me that a person is so much more than the jeans they’re wearing or the accusations spoken over them.

God loved that person enough to lay down the life of His own Son for them.

And that kind of love leaves room for them at my table too.
Every one of them.
Every time.

He had a seat for me.

And friend, He has one with your name on it, too.