Mercy, Grace, Mercy, Grace

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Last week was very tough for me.  I had very missed family come and go quickly, my daughter graduated, my employer became tougher and more concise with less time to finish, and my life relationships with people became somewhat strangulated at times.   

As I am writing this, I am sitting by my husband’s hospital bed.  He’s finally asleep and the oxygen is slowing purring quietly after a crazy evening and morning with a heart scare that landed him in hospital. 

I sense I am going a bit crazy today.

The words catch in my throat somewhere in the midst of filling out admittance papers and monitoring my teen’s activities via text messages. Maybe another day I could have found something to weakly chuckle about through the choking words, but today stinging tears of exhaustion and desperation blur my vision. 

From my vantage point in the cold hospital room, sitting across an empty and non used commode, it all looks despairingly familiar, a millionth showing of a frame jammed on replay. And at this point in the scene, the script calls for me to sink my head down to my chest and have a good cry…or just give up and run away.

It’s me who is just about broken, somewhere deep inside 

Closing my eyes to the whirl, my mind’s eye makes out the staggering woman tripping, scuffing her knees, the minuscule pebbles aflame along the scrape. I wince: I know the pain of falling. Then she raises a hand, trembling, to make a final grab for his hem and hope: “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well” (Matt. 9:21).

When I am going a bit crazy, can I remember to close my eyes, and stretch out a quavering hand? Relinquishing my slipping grip on a frenzied day, I lunge to touch Christ’s hem, the hem of Him who can restore and renew. “And Jesus perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” (Mark 5:30). 

To touch Christ is to touch the power of hope, the power of wholeness, the power of healing.

He to whose hem I cling leads me to the Cross He asks me to embrace. In the whirlpool of a day spiraling out of control, He takes my hand from his hem and calls me to carry a cross. …and yet I still hear Him whisper to my heart,

To walk this way of the Cross is to take up the way of mercy and grace. As He pours mercy mingled down upon this head leaning against the foot of the cross, so now He calls me to similarly extend grace in this hospital room, busy teens and their weary mother. When I am going a bit crazy, I must remember to press lips to this Cross, and inhale: receive Christ’s mercy… then exhale: give Christ’s grace. 

 Mercy, grace, mercy, grace.

Touching the cross resuscitates me, changing how I breathe, how I live…

When I’m going a bit crazy, I need to find a cave, enter into the still, and let new life stir.

Whether I close my eyes for a moment, or slip into an empty room, I can touch the stillness of the cave and let the powers of new life heal these wounds, revive me, restore to wholeness.

Finding the quiet of Christ’s cave wherever I am even in a cold non-inviting hospital room to resurrect and pregnant me with a new, life-giving ways, fill me, grow in me, produce fruit in me.

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