I {LOVE} Sunday::mercy triumphs...

{With the Sunday Community at Lisha's #GiveMeGrace }

I can guess what you're thinking...

It was delightfully (and surprisingly) cool a week or so ago, and though my time was generally consumed with events surrounding my daughter's college graduation, I basked in as much of the turn-off-the-air-conditioning, open-the-windows, and linger-on-my-backyard-swing moments I could capture. 

And I can already guess what you're thinking.

After weeks, if not months, of finding little more than a photo here and there on the pages of Pollywog Creek, you'd think I'd have something more interesting than the weather to write about.

It's not that I'm not writing.

Late last year I resigned from the magazine writing I'd been working on for several years. My lifestyle no longer reflected the target audiences my articles were reaching, and I'd exhausted all I knew to say. When I received an offer to write for an upstart magazine that would both tap into my knowledge base and challenge my comfort zones by pushing me out of those areas of experience, I knew it was time to make a change, and I love it.

I treasure the online communities I'm part of and the relationships that have developed as a result, but my new assignments have taken me away from the computer and face-to-face with remarkable women whose stories I get to uncover in conversations over coffee or brunch. I get to be amazed as their stories unfold -- stories I'm trusted to retell in just so many words that never seem like enough. 

I'm also working (albeit slowly) on a series of children's books based on my archived and no longer available "Letters from Mimi's Backyard."

And I'm writing in places unfit for public consumption. I can't remember a time when I didn't process life in writing, and I have baskets of journals as evidence. The thought sometimes occurs to me -- usually at night when I'm trying to go to sleep -- that I probably should cull my journals and destroy those I'd rather no one ever discovers, because I can't reconcile scripture and the doctrine of Imago Dei with the popular sentiment that it's alright to tell your stories even if it hurts those who "behave badly."*

Since the beginning of her last semester in college, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way through Beth Moore's study on James, Mercy Triumphs. In her teaching on James 4.9-11, Beth addresses the proliferation of cynicism in our religious pop-culture that is expressed in how believers are so willing to publicly ridicule other believers -- especially in what we say and write online -- and it should turn our joy to gloom (vs 9).

There's a way to tell our stories without shaming others or being cynical, I believe -- a way that leaves wide spaces for grace and mercy to work in those who have hurt us and whose misbehavior has left scars on our souls. I can only imagine how I would feel if places I have failed to "behave better" (of which there are many) were written about on the pages of public journals, blogs, and social media platforms. 

So sometimes when weeks pass without anything more than a "Still Saturday" or "I Love Sunday" post, it's because I'm processing life more privately. 

*I edited this paragraph from when it was first posted after I realized I'd ventured too close to doing exactly what I was trying to avoid. Oh, the irony of it all. What does Proverbs say? When words are many, transgression is not lacking.

No good thing {Psalm 84.11 memory verse}...

Here's the problem with holding onto that verse: I don't always know what's good {for me}, and I'm completely incapable of walking uprightly on my own.

God doesn't make it difficult for me to know how to walk uprightly - in obedience to His commands and within the boundaries He has established in His Word and written on my heart - but it's a walk I'm powerless to make outside the blood-bought shield of grace and the mercies of each new day. 

...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Romans 3:23-25

To leave a space for ponderings...

I can't get over God's sovereignty in all my affairs - how he arranges and weaves and ordains my comings and goings, and the immeasurable grace he saturates - over, around and through - this undeserving and broken vessel of mercy called me. 

My new Starbucks friend tells me she studies new words - and rightfully so, she's delighted with the meaning of grace. The undeserved favor of God, she tells me, but when she reads the tagline on my business card: Cultivating an eye for life's mercies..., she's puzzled and asks, What exactly is mercy?

I give her the answer that's been given to me. It's like this, I tell her. Grace is the gift of God's favor through Christ - favor we don't deserve, because there's nothing we can do to earn it. But mercy is the measure of God's compassion for us in that along with giving us what we don't deserve, he doesn't give us what we do.

She focuses on the wall over my shoulder and I see how she silently flips the words over and over in her thoughts - grace and mercy, grace and mercy. The same but different. Two sides of the same coin - the redemption for a wretch like me.   

I feel God's favor in this conversation across the top of our laptop screens - two women once strangers, venti cups of lattes on the table next to our iPhones and lifestyle worlds apart. I later wonder about the young man sitting to my right who's trying to work, his laptop open, but held captive by two women whose animated conversation has invaded his space as though he didn't exist.

An agent tells me - a year ago - she doesn't like my tagline. It's not clear, she says, this cultivating an eye for life's mercies, and I wrestle with changing it; but sometimes there needs to be space for questions, for curiosity and holy ponderings.

And when you know that you know that something fits, that it's right for you, you hold on and own it - trusting there's a reason. Maybe it's this table in Starbucks. Maybe there's more. I go where God leads me or I dare not go at all. 

That we have received anything good – any forgiveness, any acceptance with God, any glimpse of his glory, any hope of everlasting joy – this is all mercy. John Piper

Agent or not - it's all mercy. It's all grace. And it's all good.

All my days...

My heart sank when the first azalea bloom caught my eye. It wasn't even Thanksgiving. 

By January, the shrubs under the sweet gum trees in the backyard and under the scrub oaks that line the circular drive out to the road burst with color, and I wanted to cry.  

I wandered round and through the bushes with my camera - my lens focused on the perfusion of pink, but my thoughts zoomed forward to March - when the azaleas are supposed to bloom like this. 

And I said it out loud. If everything blooms this early in winter, there won’t be any flowers left for spring. 

Ridiculous, I know. The only day I have is this one - the day I'm breathing and living, and to cry about flowers because they won't be here tomorrow would be ludicrous if it weren't so absurd.  

The gifts of the day are like manna, I know – always enough and more than I deserve, but oh, how easy it is to forget that there’s manna for the days ahead. It might even be sweeter. 

And so it is, this first day of March, when the shrubs under the sweet gum trees in the backyard and under the scrub oaks that line the circular drive out to the road continue to burst with a perfusion of pink, and I want to cry. 

God's goodness to me is without measure.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life... Psalm 23:6 ESV