The Thing About Mercy

The longer I live, the more I understand that God's mercy knows no bounds.

In His mercy He makes room for me. He calls me higher even when I go astray. There is a song that says it is His love that leads us to repentance, and I have found that to be one of the truest things I have ever heard. Romans 2:4 asks the question plainly: "Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?"

It is not the fear of punishment that has brought me to my knees the most. It is His kindness. His patience. The way He keeps making room for me even when I have given Him every reason not to. When I think about His mercy, gratitude is the only response I have.

And part of that gratitude is this: sitting down to write.

God has asked me to write for a long time. And for a long time, I have wrestled with it. Not entirely because I doubted I could. But also, if I am being honest, partly because I doubted I could. The questions would come the moment I sat down. What do I write about? If the King of Glory is telling me to write, there must be something specific He wants said, so where do I start? Fiction? Non-fiction? A love story? A devotional? And somewhere in the middle of all those unanswered questions, I would stop before I truly began.

But I have always known certain things about myself. Not as wishes. Not as distant dreams. As a knowing. I was made to be a writer. An orator. A storyteller. A speaker. These things have lived inside me longer than I have had words for them. The gap is not in the knowing. The gap is in the stepping.

This past week I have had an unsettling in my spirit that I cannot ignore. A recurring question rising up from somewhere deep: Who am I? Not in a crisis kind of way. In a holy disruption kind of way. A sense that there is more. More than I am currently living. More than I am currently stepping into. Almost like an alarm going off from the inside, telling me that the capacity for more is already here and the time to recognize it is now.

And then yesterday I heard it again. Simply. Quietly. Write.

I said, write what? And the answer that came back stopped me completely.

When you put pen to paper, something will come alive.

So here I am. Pen to paper. And it is true. Something about this feels right in a way that is hard to fully explain, mostly because it is not about having all the answers yet. It is about obedience. I do not know the full picture of what I am writing toward. But I know the One who sent me, and I know that a sent person does not send themselves. I answer to the One who called me. And today, that is enough.