In my Pauline epistles class, my professor said that instead of thinking of our spiritual things as something we enjoy doing, perhaps they are something which requires sacrifice on our part. I don't see why they can't be both. I've gotten to a place where I automatically reject any Christianese anti-joy stance, because I firmly believe God desires for us to enjoy life and the gifts He gives us. But it makes a lot of sense that in our broken world, the things that ought to bring us joy will also bring us pain.
A couple years ago I asked some people from church to identify my spiritual gifts, and instead of continuing to listen to my professor (who I really do love, but well, I have a short attention span when I'm interested in something else), I searched my emails. There it was, Joel saying he thought I had the spiritual gift of mercy, long before I considered studying counseling and making mercy a career.
I thought back several months, when I spent an agonizing evening with my friend Libby, opening up for the first time to a friend about how the weight of the world sometimes feels like it will break me, how my bouts of depression are more often global in scale than personal. The ways people hurt each other, the inevitability of war and abuse and my helplessness to do anything about it--this can feel unbearable. Libby said I take too much responsibility for other people's feelings, and she is absolutely right. But I think there is something else to it.
If my spiritual gift is mercy, and if spiritual gifts require sacrifice, then this makes sense. Mercy only exists where sin exists. Being tapped into the richness of mercy necessarily means being tapped into the depths of sinfulness. There some days I find this exchange more acceptable than others.
I have always been an emotional sucker for underdogs. I cried for Gollum more than any other character in The Lord of the Rings, because he just needed unconditional love, oh my God. My absolute favorite part of counseling is when a client tentatively admits to some secret, and by not reacting in horror, I get to watch their faces open up just a tiny bit in trust before the rest comes out. All the shame, all the horrible things they have thought or felt or done. I love being the person to hear their worst and to say, "I'm so sorry you went through that. I understand why you would have done that. I'm so grateful you shared that with me." I hadn't really thought of it as mercy before, but of course it is. I love seeing someone at their worst and saying, "I'm not going to punish you for that."
My overabundance of mercy is counterbalanced by an incredibly diminished capacity for justice. I hate war, I hate revenge, I hate the death penalty, I hate giving up on someone. My church is going through Joshua right now, and I very much appreciate how nearly every week whoever is preaching addresses the complexity of what it means to serve an occasionally genocidal God. I struggle with that a lot, and the concept of God's justice in general. There are exceptions, though. I think of the men and women who kidnap children and naive young women, who sell other people's bodies for sex and abuse, who buy homes paid for by someone else's nightmare. I think of those people, and my capacity for mercy shrivels up until I understand God's justice. I understand His disgust with our sin, His desire to see it--to see us--utterly destroyed.
That's unusual, though. And honestly, if I met someone who worked in the sex trafficking industry and managed to talk to them, I'm sure I would discover their own background of abuse and neglect and pain. I'd like to think that I could learn to empathize with even these disgusting people, that I could learn to show mercy to them.
That doesn't negate justice. I understand that justice is an attribute of God, despite my usual inability to fathom it or especially to appreciate it. But I just read G. K. Chesterson's Orthodoxy in which he states the inherent paradoxes of Christianity. Ours is a religion, not of balance, but of passion. Christianity has inspired the gruesomest wars in history as well as an enduring community of people committed to non-violence. Our God is entirely just and entirely merciful, and I think His people, being finite where He is infinite, are able to inhabit and display just one or two of His attributes. Someone else has justice covered. I've got mercy, for worse and for better.
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