Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!

“It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.They are new every morning” - Lamentations 3:22-23

(The following is a reflection penned the night my mother died after I found out how a nurse’s aide had stayed by her bedside in the final hour or so of her life. This unsung stranger talked calm words and read the Scripture to my mom who could neither hear nor respond except in some unknown way. And so I paused to think of how our lives are marked by mercy from beginning to end, how we are defined and molded by mercy, and how it flows from a thousand unacknowledged sources to fill the hours of our days. May we marvel at its mighty and majestic work and be the willing agents of its spread.)

Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!
How vital to each individual human soul,
God’s rain to quench the drought,
That stretches back to Adam’s folly,
Falling patchwork style,
Upon garden hearts that look to unseen skies,
And wait precariously on mystic clouds,
Grown dark with promises of grace,
While mercy drops kick up the dust of our loose-lived lives,
With the portent of showers and floods to come.

Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!
How vital to each human heart,
From birth’s first cry for human touch,
To childhood needs too plentiful to count,
Where mother’s love and father’s care,
Sustain the fine thin line between,
The fruitful life or blasted barrenness,
And even in the grown-up land,
Grace must do its daily work,
Pulling sap to dizzying heights,
To keep the hillsides green and winter in its place.

Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!
How vital to each human end,
When houses, lands lie fallen by the way,
And life is narrowed to a single bed,
One closet with a week’s apparel,
And one small board stuck with colored pins,
That hold some frames of a life gone by;
Grace descends three times a day,
Where crusts of bread become as prized,
As bags of gold or grandpa’s watch,
And a dear one’s voice is gift enough,To keep alive the will to live, if only one more day

Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!
How vital to all human-kind,
Where total strangers mingle in,
And leave their mark in gentle ways,
They stop by bedsides, filling gaps,
In final vigils, or with simple acts,
They guide the floating bark as it departs;
One wipes a brow, one changes sheets,
One for pay, another just because,
Grace compels which no logic can explain,
To speak soft words, to read the Book of Books,
And thereby spend, the final hour in dark of night, alone,To keep an appointment set 93 years before.