I Wanted Mercy And I Got Administration

Quarter to five and the day is over and the kitchen is the best part, which everybody knows and nobody says.

Four of them at the sink and the counter. The radio on low. Somebody boxing up cake that will be eaten in a car within nine minutes. The story about the woman who came at eleven and would not stop talking, being told again, with love, and getting funnier.

And her, drying, with her bag on the chair by the door and a sheet of paper in it.

They had done the exercise mid-morning. Forty questions. She had filled it in honestly, which she is glad about and also is the whole problem.

Hers came back administration.

Which is true. Everybody in that kitchen would tell you it is true and would mean it as high praise, because she is the reason the day worked and the reason there was enough coffee and the reason a woman with a wheelchair got in the door without a conversation about it.

And she is standing there drying a tray, at forty-eight years old, feeling something she would be ashamed to name if anybody asked her.

She wanted it to say mercy.

She has wanted somebody to tell her that for about twenty years. Because underneath the clipboard she has always suspected something about herself, which is that she is efficient in rooms where other people are moved, and that when the woman at eleven would not stop talking, her first feeling was not compassion, it was a calculation about the schedule.

So the paper did not describe her wrong. That is not the ache. The ache is that she thinks it described her exactly, and the thing it named is the thing she was afraid was all there is.

What is not on this page

Let me say it now, straight, because you have a tray in your hand and no time for a long way round.

Nothing here is going to give you a better word, and nothing here is going to give you mercy on a page. There is no re-scoring, no deeper instrument, no way of describing you closely enough that you can take it as the diagnosis you were hoping for. And there is no list at the end for you to find yourself on.

And nothing here is going to make administration sound like a booby prize, or make the woman who ran it careless. She read a real result to a room and she was right.

You are not being handed the small word while other people get the beautiful one, and there is no accurate label out there that would settle what you have been asking for twenty years. That is not me consoling you. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman categorized before He would deal with her.

The verse for a person who suspects herself

Here is the sentence I want in that kitchen with you, and Paul writes it in a letter full of people who have gone wrong.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

Read what it is doing.

Paul has just named two men whose faith came apart publicly. Everybody in that church would have been running the same check you run in a kitchen at quarter to five, which is: how do I know I am not one of them, given what I know about myself.

And Paul does not answer with evidence. He does not say look at your fruit, examine your motives, check whether you felt the right thing about the woman at eleven.

He says the foundation stands sure, and the seal on it is that the Lord knows His own.

You are known by God, and the knowing is the seal rather than something you have to produce evidence for. I am not softening that. 2 Timothy 2:19 makes His knowing the foundation and not the conclusion of an audit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it hold weight in a woman drying a tray.

Mercy is not a temperature

Now the other half, and this one is worth hearing carefully.

You are measuring mercy by what you felt at eleven o'clock. First response, in your chest, before you had time to think. And by that measure you failed, because what arrived first was a calculation about the schedule.

Watch where Scripture actually puts mercy.

The Samaritan on the road is described by what he did. He went to him. He bound up. He set him on his own beast. He paid. There is one line about compassion and eight about logistics, and it is the logistics that Jesus tells the lawyer to go and copy.

You got a woman in a wheelchair through a door today without making her ask. That is not the opposite of mercy. In that woman's account of her own day, that is the mercy.

You have been doing the thing you have been accusing yourself of not feeling, and the word describes mercy by its actions more often than by its temperature. That is Luke 10 in its own proportions, and the Spirit who was given to help us is not standing in that kitchen taking the temperature of your first reaction.

And even that is not the ground

But I do not want to leave you standing on that, because it is still evidence, and evidence is exactly the thing that has been eating you for twenty years.

If the ground were what you did today, you would be back at the sink tomorrow reviewing the tape.

The ground is that He knows His own, and the sentence is a seal on a foundation, which means it was set before you got here and it does not move when your first reaction disappoints you.

You are known and sealed, and no self-audit you conduct at a sink is capable of touching that. The word calls it a foundation that stands sure, and the Spirit who searches all things has known about the calculation at eleven o'clock all day and has not moved.