Mercy

 Mercy came confidently knocking at my door around noontime. I wasn’t expecting her. Dressed in a green suede shirt with holes in it, she seemed so unassuming that I nearly missed the importance of her visit. I invited her in, unsure I should allow myself the luxury, but she, in her enormity, wrapped herself warmly around me. She came to teach me to forgive myself before forgiving others, “It makes you more believable” she said.

 I was glad she came and joined her near the window, where we bathed in sunlight. She likes the light. She didn’t want details, but gently moved me toward a distant hope I had not imagined. Mercy knows so much about people; she realizes that sin and emptiness are born from uncontrollable fear. “This was the reason, she says, that “Jesus repeated the phrase, “fear not”, more than anything else he stated.

 I asked her if she had a best friend, she said “sure”, and told me her name is kindness.   Kindness and Mercy are always together, like soul sisters, where there is one; the other is not far behind.  

 Mercy stayed long enough that I will always remember her, she left a calling card – it reads, “The Mercy of God is above all Divine work”.

 

A Woman Caught in Adultery

8 Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, ² but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. ³ As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

⁴ “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. ⁵ The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

⁶ They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. ⁷ They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” ⁸ Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

⁹ When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. ¹⁰ Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

¹¹ “No, Lord,” she said.

And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”