It says mercy twice

The Lord is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. The Lord is good to all: and His tender mercies are over all His works. Psalm 145:8-9

I want to be like Him.  Truly.  

No matter what.

Gracious.  Full of compassion. Slow to anger.  Of great mercy.  Good to all.  Tender mercies in everything I do.  

Last night we had another dinner under a fuzzy crescent moon and the twinkly lights.  Another moment of musing on the works of His hands.  How all the pieces fit together.  So, wow, really maybe almost five years ago we invited Wilson over for dinner.  Every year Jon Heine sends out a plea for folks to invite international graduate students over for dinner with a nice American family, and pretty much every year I say yes, and we have a great conversation, and then, well graduate students get really busy with their labs and their teaching and their research and we never see them again.  So I served pizza to Wilson and he was a smart, thoughtful guy from Brazil working on his PhD in marketing and that was that.  

Except a year later he was waiting on our front doorstep when we drove up after church.  And he had a question.  Could his girlfriend who did not speak a word of English stay with us and study?  Her father said she had to stay with a nice American family, and well, we were it.  So in January Fernanda moved in and she was beautiful and she studied English at Pima and in the library and with the county and everywhere she could, except late at night we drifted into Spanish because one’s brain stops working at a certain point.  And she was shy and we didn’t see so much of her because she was in her room or because she was with Wilson and we lived life as best we could.  

Marco showed up on our front doorstep as well, and Mr. Intentional Community dragged her out of the back room and sat us all together around the dinner table including Sergio from the back house and we all lived life as best we could.

And then Wilson and Fernanda got married.  Sometimes we saw them.  But life got busy and suddenly he has graduated and they are moving to Portugal next week. And we had them over for one more dinner.  And his mother.  And his sister. And her husband.  I was sort of tired and busy and the house looked like I had been traveling for three weeks and no Panchita so I cheated and bought dinner at Trader Joe’s.  Even though Fernanda’s favorite thing is my bread.  And it was so very lovely with three-buck Chuck and little melon slices wrapped in mozzarella cheese and thinly sliced sausage and a basil leaf, and at the end of it, Wilson had a question.  

How do you live like this?  You and Alan?

Certainly the question caught us off guard.  The answer was pretty important because Wilson said that he told everyone he knows that he wants to live just like us. Being able to stick our head up above the rushing current and breathe. And Alan had his Buckminster Fuller quote about how a man must decide early on whether he will make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.  

But I verbally stumbled through a slightly different tack, which really comes from another Buckminster quote: Here is God's purpose–for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.  A little lesson in logic.  If I irrefutably have experienced His tangible and measurable love for me, and since who am I in the great flow of humanity–no one special, then His tangible and measurable love is extended to all–and I want to be part of the Big Story, of what matters in the long run.

The Lord is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. The Lord is good to all: and His tender mercies are over all His works. Psalm 145:8-9

And of course it doesn’t look it very often.  I mess up again and again.  And I tell myself that I just have to pick myself up once again, brush off the dust, shove all of those dark thoughts out of my brain, and set off again, trotting like a little hobbit, in my Father’s footsteps. 

Except of course, that is not true.  It’s not about me.

The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down. Psalm 145:14

I am not picking myself up at all.  

It’s all about Him. At work through me. But not by me.  He does it all.  His grace.  His glory.  His work.  His verb.

Dear LORD, may it be so.