Mercy

Some people live inside their head.

I cannot. 

I can’t because there’s anger and doubt and insecurity too. 

Maybe I’m scared of the person I’d find if I spent some time with him. Or maybe I already know who he is and want nothing to do with him. 

Maybe when it comes down to it, I despise the person that lives inside my head. 

He’s vile and slanderous; he’s an unfair judge; he’s hateful and wicked; he’s arrogant and deceitful; he’s consumed with lust; he’s a liar, a true scoundrel; there is nothing good about the man inside my head. 

And so maybe that’s why I live for experiences, to forget for a time the one above my brows. I don’t want to reason with my own inner self, so I hide in extraversion and friendly banter. I live for the distraction of human interaction. Others help me play off my own sin nature. “See, they’re no better than I.” 

Ah, there’s the heart of it! I hide behind my “personality” like a politician behind his smile. 

There. I admit it. This is who I am. 

This is the human condition, the cards we’ve all been dealt. We do what we can to mask the truth, but the truth remains. 

But this narrative would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the life of Jesus Christ because he was fully human and yet he lived a perfect life void of sin. He took the wrongdoing of everybody else and was murdered in our place. 

This is Dictionary.com’s definition of mercy: “compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one’s power.”

So here is the truth of the matter: I have offended God by my sin; I deserve death. But instead of striking me down where I stand, he had mercy on me. He sent Jesus his son to live a perfect life as a human and to be murdered in my place, taking my past, present, and future sin, and removing it as far as the east is from the west.

He did it because he loves me and wants to have an intimate relationship with me.

This is the ultimate picture of mercy and I would be a fool to reject it. But that is what so many do. It deeply saddens me when I think of all those who never experience the joy of falling into the arms of the one who created them in the first place.