'Everyone is doing the best that we can'

I am fortunate enough to live nearby a local Quaker community that runs weekly unprogrammed meetings. This particular Quaker community has folks that run the gamut and represent everything from Buddhist Quakers to Agnostic Quakers to Animist Quakers such as myself. The unprogrammed portion just means that there isn’t a sole leader such as a pastor role. Rather, the community as a collective offers guidance up as the spirit moves around the circle. So when a message comes through one, it’s almost like the message is an accrued wisdom of the group that’s been allowed to percolate in the silence until the message is ready to come through and more or less lands on one of us. 

At one of these meetings I was blessed with both delivering and bearing witness to the idea that ‘everyone is doing the best that we can’. The idea that each of us is doing the best that we can, on any given day and in any given moment, and that this ‘best’ can look drastically different between people, and even for the same person between days and at any given moment. This idea of leading with the grace that each of us might really be doing the best that we can, and affording the benefit of the doubt when that ‘best’ looks quite different than the expectations we are holding around what it should look like, whether this is for ourselves or others. And also knowing that on our not so good days, our ‘best’ may look like not being able to give much space to this idea of ‘everyone is doing the best that we can’, and letting that be okay too.