Five Minute Friday - Mercy

Writing again this week with Lisa Jo Baker and the Five Minute Friday Crew. This blessed, beautiful place where we open our hearts and let words and tears and the inner workings of our lives bleed and flow and dance across the virtual pages. Yes, this community opens wide and invites you in to share. Come and visit and read. You will be blessed.

This Week: Mercy

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I feel like I have been fighting with weakness all my life. You’ve heard me say that before – how this is hard for me. How I hate the weaknesses that I see in myself. How I have struggled to accept imperfections and see flaws as fatal features. Even when I know it’s okay, I do not easily open up or let down my guard. All the time, I must be held together, put together, in one precise piece. It’s like a terrifying balancing act that I both embrace and ignore. It worked for a while. I was the oldest. I was organized. After a brief stint of not having it together, I turned it around and had it freakishly together in school. Everything was rolling along. And beneath the cover of togetherness was a roiling fury of terror at being discovered that it was not all actually together.

My cover broke in a hard way – as trust was smashed to pieces and everything I thought was strong was shattered and my faith in God and His church was rocked to the core. Everything spilled through the torn places and I entered the first dark place in my life.

In this dark place, I hid away from God. I disavowed the fellowship of His people. I saw no one.



photo by Karpati Gabor

All I could see was emptiness and brokenness and weakness, and I did not know what to do with it or how to handle it. God had always been a God of light and praise. A God of the good times and gentle places. A God of strength and might. The God I knew did not go into darkness. The God I knew did not deal in weakness.

Curious that when I began to long for God, I found my way back to Him through the most structured, formal church I could find. I thought that if I hid behind solemn liturgy (the opposite of where I’d been before) I might find a fraction of what I’d lost. I had no expectations.

And had no idea that it would be the chanted acclamation of Kyrie eleison that would pierce through the shell of my soul that morning. How the echo of Lord have Mercy, Christ have Mercy would resound in my heart and become the awakening of my spirit to an understanding that it was the weakness I despised that allowed Him to move in me and through me.

It was not my togetherness that God wanted. It was not my organization, or my strength, or my determination. Or any of those other things that I had carried and cultivated for so long and with such careful precision. It was my weakness, my brokenness, and my surrendered spirit. Given in trust into His loving hands. For His healing. For His kingdom.

kyrie eleison
christe eleison

His mercy made me whole.
It still does.

Stop

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