When I respond to comments on the YouTube channel Off the Left Eye, it is anonymous. I do not usually leave my name, and they are often masked by a fictional handle. There is someone who has been in the conversation for months, without either of us hearing each other's voice or seeing one another's face. But I am charmed by this person's self-given title. 

"Human-in-the-making."

What a concise acknowledgement of both our vulnerability as people, and our potential. My daughters, the ones who are delving into their fifth languages, are far more adept than I am at verb forms. I can mostly partner nouns and actions up in my mono linguistic efforts, but my daughters are facile with the roots of such possibilities as pluperfect, past passive and future perfect progressive.

While I don't know the tense of that user's choice, and feel tense at my own ignorance, I welcome the invitation to apply it to myself. I am not finished. The version of me that got angry last week, and that is confused about world events is not the final one. That simple reality calms me. Much of life's expectations lean into completion.... earning a degree, finishing a marathon, arriving at a destination. 

I think one of the reasons that angels are eager to give us the benefit of the doubt when we stumble is their freedom from such short term limits. 

"Those who are guided by kindness, on the other hand, hardly even notice evil in another but pay attention instead to everything good and true in the person. When they do find anything bad or false, they put a good interpretation on it. This is a characteristic of all angels — one they acquire from the Lord, who bends everything bad toward good." Secrets of Heaven 1079, Emanuel Swedenborg