Friday, October 8, 2021

Grace Period

As of me writing these words, I have an assignment due in about 15 minutes, and it's not quite ready. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be. My teacher for this particular class has the generous policy of accepting assignments that are up to two days late. Assignments are always due on Fridays at 11:59pm in this class, but the Saturday and Sunday afterward form a "grace period," where the assignment is technically late, but not marked down for being late.

Arguably, life is a sort of "grace period" as well. It's a period of time where we're supposed to learn, and we're allowed to make mistakes. Naturally, there are things we're supposed to do or not do, but even if/when we mess up, it won't necessarily put a bad mark on our permanent record. As long as we repent before it's really too late, our imperfections don't have to be permanently damning.

That said, neither grace period is going to last forever, and our earthly grace period has a sort of "abusing it and lose it" policy, where if we try to abuse the system, such as by deliberately sinning with the intent to repent later, the system will prove less reliably exploitable than we might have hoped. We still need to repent and get our homework done, even with the small amount of leeway we've generously been given.

We all rely on grace periods like these. We just need to be careful to not grow comfortable with relying on them.

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