“No, that’s not right. Do it this way.”
I had heard critical, cutting words for many years. My father was a short man—short on mercy, grace, and stature. His love was thin and hard, sporadic, and seldom spoken. When he did show love, it was on a grand scale, too grand to cover the daily paper cuts or the weekly “You’re never good enough.” It was an unmerciful love.
I learned the same hard love that ran a litany in my head: Protect yourself—always, at least on some level. Don’t show mercy because others will perceive it as weakness. Mercy makes you too soft to battle the brutal out there. And don’t make yourself vulnerable because you won’t survive the hard realities of unforgiveness.
Then, the day before Father’s Day, the first one after my father passed away, the Bible verse of the day caught me short with the juxtaposition of my father versus my heavenly Father: Be merciful, just as your father is merciful.
On some level, my father sought to teach me to be kind—but not merciful. Doing so creates a surface veneer of shallow civility rather than deep heart-level concern for God’s other children.
Then the Lord wooed me in the dark and desert places of a heart made lonely by the hard. He walked with me to a place of brokenness where the hard either became a brittle wall or where the mercy of the One who loves me best transformed me. I had a choice. Through prayer, I chose to believe God and take my father to the Father.
Unfortunately, it is still too natural and easy to pick up a brick to recreate that hard wall and retreat behind a bombed-out fortress rather than allow my heart to be merciful to others and myself. But when it rains in the desert of God’s making, the soil softens, mercy blooms, and a deluge of God’s mercy graces my heart.
Find ways to let the rain of your merciful Father keep falling in your life.
Sari Butler is a writer.