Mercy :: Five-Minute Friday
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Mercy
We've been calling it "silly good", as in God, you are being silly good.
The rental home in our dream neighborhood we found on a last-ditch effort last fall, the location for our church to worship after too many years being in an ill-fitting building, the ridiculously cheap airline tickets we found for our kids to attend my daughter's makeshift pandemic-era wedding in October, the acquisitions editor contacting me out of the blue to ask for book proposals, key vocational invitations pointing me toward my truest callings, some beautiful ministry relationships blooming from the most unexpected places.
The unexpected abundance of God that leaves us so speechless, we're left with only this childlike burble: God, you are being so silly good.
Another word for it could be mercy. The unexpected, unearned, outsized goodness of God that leaves us knowing without a doubt we have a good Father who does not keep a record of our right or wrong choices in order to determine His benevolence.
It strikes me that each gift I mentioned above - the house, neighborhood, church building, daughter's wedding, vocational and ministry journeys - carry with them the memory of uncertainty and anguish. Sometimes I'm tempted to imagine the moments before the gift arrives as the price of my end of the bargain with God. The days of unrelenting suffering and deferred hope have marked me, and not just figuratively. I carry them in the worry line taking up residence on my forehead, the perpetual tension in my jawline and the occasional spirals of self-doubt that I've taken the wrong path, followed the wrong directions, or otherwise disqualified myself from the goodness and mercy I want for all of my days.
Jacob wrestled with God and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He literally wouldn't let God go until he got the blessing he needed in order to keep moving, living, and having his being.
But that's not mercy. That's the tumult of living in relationship and love. It's the daily ground of learning how to give and receive goodness with our Creator in the midst of a broken and cursed world. Loving another, especially God, marks us.
Mercy is something else. Mercy is the thing that happens when God's already obliterated the record we've been keeping about how much we owe God and others in order to receive goodness and then writes a whole new storyline that we never saw coming and could never have written for ourselves because it's a far better plot twist than we thought we deserved.
I'll keep looking for the right words, but in the meantime all I know to say is Lord, you are silly good. Christ, you are silly good. Lord, you are silly good.
May you know the merciful, silly good love of our Father God, brother Jesus, and gift-giving Holy Spirit this weekend, friends. Hallelujah!
p.s. Here's a silly good sunset we saw last week in the silly good neighborhood God gave us to live while we were walking with silly good friends who are becoming silly good neighbors and joining us in the life and work of worshipping God in our silly good church home.
Welcome to a new weekly feature, Five-Minute Friday. For the remaining weeks of Ordinary Time, I'll be sharing a five-minute written reflection on one word I've been pondering. (I'm literally setting a stopwatch for five minutes so that I can just write already!)
From the beginning, I've intended to share new writing with you here. The most accessible patron tier is called "Stories" for a reason!
At the same time, it's been a brutal eighteen months for my creative brain. The combination of global crisis and suffering and some extraordinary suffering within our family has pinned me down to the level of "groanings that can not be uttered" more days than not.
Still, I can't not write. And so, I begin again. Thanks for being a listening community and a safe place to offer stories from my everyday experiences and epiphanies. I'm grateful for your companionship.
I'd love to hear your reflections from this week. Feel free to respond to the word "mercy" or just share your own experiences and epiphanies from the week.
*This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up. You can see my first Five-Minute Friday post here.