How do you react to a compliments?

How do you take compliments? Recently, I was impressed by how one of my friends accept complements with grace, because I am not good at it. Instead of saying 'thank you' and appreciating the person for the compliment, I would either point out why I don't deserve the compliments or I would try to shrug it off. In essence, by refusing the compliment, I am implying that the person sense of observation is faulty. However the truth is, the refusal more to do with my sense of self worth than anything else. Like most people, I am not good in giving as well as receiving compliments. In this blog, I am going to talk about why and how to take compliments with grace and with my next blog, I would take why it is important to give compliments.

In this life, we all make mistakes, no one is exempt from it and we will continue to make many more as long as we live. But, we are so much more than our mistakes. We are not perfect but we are whole. Personally, I find perfection over rated and I think it is wrong and unfair to expect perfection from anyone, including ourselves. Wholeness - yes, perfection - no. We all have been broken by life so many times. However, God has taken all these pieces of our broken self and put it together to create a unique and magnificent being that we are, like a mosaic artist.  Mosaic is an art form made up of broken and fragmented pieces of glass, tile, or other material. Through the mastery of an artist, they're formed together into something beautiful and meaningful. That is why we have to believe and accept our beauty.

Like the mosaic, we have our unique beauty. We are all beautiful, lovable and deserving of love. But, we can be able to see that in ourselves or in others, only if we can see it through love.  Fred Ebb, in his song  “If You Could See Her through My Eyes “  expresses how he sees her charm and beauty, even though he knows these virtues are not seen by others.

The lyrics reminds me of how we feel when  friends communicate their appreciation of elements of us for which we don’t share the same fondness. Friends might compliment us on the characteristics that we haven’t learned to embrace. They think we are clear and decisive, when we think we can be stubborn. They like our independence that we think that we don’t have great skills by not including others in our plan. They admire our  body shape when all we think that its’ not perfect. They sees the good in us. When these friends look at us through their eyes, they can see the beauty that we don't see.

So, next time someone compliments us, let us smile and say thank you. Let us accept it with grace, knowing that this person sees something in us that we have not seen in ourselves.