mercy

A Challenge from An Outsider Who Has Never Quite Fit In

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I offer you a challenge. I offer it and I take it upon myself as my own challenge. Don’t be like everybody else. Don’t be like 90% of American Christians, who are shallow and unbelievably narrow-minded (including me sometimes). Take off the blinders and step out of your comfortable box of same old people and places and look around.

I truly believe that many of God’s blessings are in the periphery where we would never take the time to look most days. We have to deliberately seek them out. Those angels unaware, who do not run in our social circles or cliques (never was there a more unbiblical concept than cliques), can only be found by stepping out of that familiar comfort zone.

Take the road less traveled. Do something you’ve been afraid to try. Strike up a conversation with someone you would ordinarily ignore. Take God out of that box and let His love and mercy consume you. Don’t ask for blessings, be one!

Also, I would like to throw in (for free) some words of wisdom from Hannah Whitall Smith:

“What I mean is that we are to hold ourselves absolutely independent of circumstances, resting only in the magnificent fact that God as our Savior is sufficient, Our inner life prospers just as well and is just as triumphant without ecstatic personal experiences or great personal doings.

We are to find God, the fact of God, sufficient for all our spiritual needs, whether we feel ourselves to be in a desert or in a fertile valley. We are to say with the prophet, ‘Although the tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stall: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation’ (Hab. 3:17-18).”

He giveth more grace (featuring a surprise guest blogger!)

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Ok, not really. It’s still me, but I am including a bit of poetry (not mine) in this blog, because it so profoundly affected me when I heard it tonight at Kairos Roots. Here it is. May it affect you like it did me and make you more thankful and grateful to our great God! Here is her story and then her poem will follow (I copied and pasted her story. Shh! Don’t tell anyone!)

“Annie Flint was born in the Johnston home where she lost her mother, then shortly after lost her father too and was raised by the Flint family. After she graduated from college, she contracted arthritis in one of its most crippling forms and lay in bed for not one or two years, but for decades of her life. And if that wasn’t bad enough she lost control of her internal organs and to her utter embarrassment had to live on diapers for many years of her life. And if that wasn’t humiliating enough she began to become blind and cancer began to take its toll…according to one eyewitness, who wrote a book(called Making of the Beautiful), the last time he saw her, she had seven pillows cushioning her body from keeping the sores from inflicting indescribable agony.

In the midst of all that, she wrote this beautiful poem:

‘He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase;
To added affliction He addeth His mercy;
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.

His love has no limit; His grace has no measure.
His pow’r has no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again!'”

Annie Johnson Flint

Blessed are the merciful

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“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7)

In the Bible, grace and mercy are many times used together. I’ve heard it put this way that grace is getting what you don’t deserve, and mercy is not getting what you do deserve. Mercy is withholding the right to revenge and giving grace instead. One of God’s characteristics is that He is merciful. If anyone had the right to exact judgment on what we’ve done wrong and how we’ve screwed up and when we’ve outright rebelled against Him, it’s God. But He in HIs grace gives us what we don’t deserve– forgiveness– and in His mercy withholds from us what we do deserve– everlasting punishment in hell.

To be merciful is to be like God. To forgive, even when forgiveness is not sought, is to be like God. Mercy is loving the unloveable. It’s easy to love someone who loves you back, but God calls us to love those who are so caught up in and trapped by fear and addictions that they are unable to love us back.

I like the Message version. It says, “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.”

If you show mercy, you get mercy. I also like to think that one of the characteristics of those who have experienced God’s grace and mercy is that they live out that grace and mercy toward others. You forgive much because you have been forgiven much. You don’t worry about the $100 worth of wrong someone did to you when God just forgave the $1 million worth of wrong you did against Him.

Brennan Manning says it best: “Our encounter with Mercy profoundly affects our interaction with others . . . . We look beyond appearances, beneath surfaces, to recognize others as companions in woundedness. Human flesh is heir to the assaults, within and without, of negative, judgmental thoughts, but we will not consent to them because God is merciful to us. We will not allow these attacks to lead us into the sins of self-preoccupation and self-defense. Swimming in the merciful love of Christ, we are free to laugh at the tendency to assume spiritual superiority– in ourselves. We are free to extend to others the mercy we have received.”

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

My prayer (as prayed by Henri Nouwen)

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nouwen

“O Lord Jesus, you who came to show the compassionate love of your Father, make your people know this love with their hearts, minds, and souls. So often we feel lonely, unloved, and lost in this valley of tears. We desire to feel affection, tenderness, care, and compassion, but suffer from inner darkness, emptiness, and numbness. I pray tonight: Come, Lord Jesus, come. Do not just come to our understanding, but enter our hearts– our passions, emotions, and feelings– and reveal your presence to us in our inmost being. As long as you remain absent from that intimate core of our experience, we will keep clinging to people, things, or events to find some warmth, some sense of belonging. Only when you really come, really touch us, set us ablaze with your love, only then will we become free and let go of all false forms of belonging. Without that inner warmth, all our ascetical attempts remain trivial, and we might even get entangled in the complex network of our own good intentions.

O Lord, I pray that your children may come to feel your presence and be immersed in your deep, warm, affective love. And to me, O Lord, your stumbling friend, show your mercy. Amen.”

From A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee by Henry Nouwen