Often times when I'm counseling clients walking through grief the topic of grace comes up. Grief is a difficult season and we often forget to ease up on ourselves, our schedules and expectations. Grief takes emotional effort, mental energy, physical energy and spiritual focus; we can't function at the level we were functioning before we started grieving. And yet we often expect ourselves to or assume that those around us are expecting us to function at our "normal" level. In order to grieve in a healthy way, we need to scale back, lower expectations, shrink schedules and to-do lists. We need to give ourselves space and time to grieve and we can't do that well if we are expecting ourselves to function at the level we were before we began the journey of grief. How can you extend yourself some grace to lower expectations, say no to requests of others, and change deadlines on your to-do list so that you can be more fully present in your grief journey?