Day 9 – Practicing Mercy

A day practicing mercy in community with the Food Pantry – Fuller Center for Housing – and Koinonia Blueberry Orchard.

To be merciful means to do whatever helping the situation demands, to pay whatever the poor man owes. We like to figure out in advance what we have to give up. What is mercy going to cost us? But true mercy doesn’t ask for limits; it only asks for opportunity. There are no outer limits to discipleship. Mercy is not traditional, not token, not sterile. Mercy is the creative risk of unlimited involvement. Mercy seldom gets off the ground when we approach it from a standpoint of a hypothetical question. It begins when we see our world as a world of neighbors. It culminates when we act toward the person in need as if the person were actually Christ. Christians gotta know, it seems to me, that a hungry man gotta have bread, a thirsty woman gotta have water, a sick man gotta have a doctor, and a woman in jail gotta have somebody to come to them. We gotta go beyond goodness to actually laying down our lives. We don’t want a reshuffling of the cards. We want to start playing with a totally new deck – loving – dying – to a totally new life – because the old cards are marked against the full purposes of God no matter how they are shuffled. We are called to be a people of mercy – and that is what we must be. Jesus became his message. We too must become the message of mercy.