The Form He Could Not Fill In

Six people in the line and a radio on somewhere behind the counter. Derek is fourth, holding a parcel against his chest, watching the top of his own phone screen the way a man does when he has decided not to be involved in anything.

At the front there is an older gentleman with a form. It is a change of address form, two sides, and he has filled in the top line twice in the wrong box. The clerk has said the same sentence to him three times now, kindly enough, but faster each time, and there is a small line of ballpoint scribble where the man has tried to cross something out and made it worse. He keeps saying sorry. He says it to the clerk, and then he turns half around and says it to the line, to nobody, to all of us.

Derek could do that form in ninety seconds. He filled in forty of them the year his mother moved. He knows exactly which box the zip code goes in. And he stands there with his parcel and does not move, because eleven years ago he was the man who always stepped in, and it cost him something he has never got back, and somewhere in that decade he made a quiet rule: not my business.

You know that rule. Maybe you made it in a different line. Maybe you were the one who drove people to appointments for years until the one who took and took, and now something in your chest goes still and careful when a need shows itself three feet away. And you have told yourself, more than once, that mercy is a large thing done by large people, and that you are neither.

Mercy Has A Size, And The Size Is Small

Let us get one thing out of the way, because it is the confusion under most of this. Mercy is not forgiveness. They are cousins and they are not twins. Forgiveness is what happens when somebody owes you and you release it. Mercy is what happens when somebody is in trouble in front of you and you meet the trouble, and whether they owe you anything at all does not come into it. You can be merciful to a total stranger who has never wronged you in his life. That is most of what mercy is.

Which means the question mercy asks is not "what did he do to deserve this?" It is a much shorter question. What does he need, and can I reach it?

Jesus was asked the narrowing question directly. A man wanted the word neighbor defined tightly enough to be manageable, and instead of defining it, Jesus told a story about a road, and finished by turning the question inside out. Then He gave the plainest instruction in the whole conversation.

He said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go, and do likewise."Luke 10:37

Notice the size of the thing that made the Samaritan a neighbor. He was passing. He had oil and wine in his kit because everybody did. He got down, he bandaged, he put the man on his own animal and walked. That is not a career. That is an afternoon.

So take this now, because it belongs to you and I am not going to make you earn it. You have something to give today, already, in your hands. That is not flattery from me; Scripture says God has given each of us something to hand on to somebody else, and it is His Spirit and not your temperament who makes an ordinary person notice a need at the right moment.

And hear the other half, because the first half alone crushes people. Mercy is not a feeling you have to work up first. Derek in that line does not need to become a warmer man before he can fill in a form. The Samaritan is never described as moved by an emotion he manufactured; he saw, he stopped, he did the next physical thing. If you waited until your heart caught up with your hands, you would wait for years. Let the hands go first. The heart is quite often following at a distance, sulking, and it arrives.

Now I want to say something to the reader who went hard. You are not a cold person and you never were. What you are is somebody who gave a great deal, got taken, and built a wall in the only place you knew how to build one, which was across everything. That is not wickedness. That is a bruise doing what bruises do. Scripture says God knows what we are made of and remembers we are dust, and His Spirit is not standing over that bruise with a clipboard.

But a wall built across everything has a cost you did not agree to, and here it is: it keeps out the ninety second things as thoroughly as it keeps out the ruinous ones. The man who took advantage of you is not in the post office. The man in the post office cannot find the box for his zip code.

That is the whole gift of a small mercy. It is small enough that being taken advantage of is not really available. Nobody moves into your house on the strength of a form. Nobody becomes your responsibility because you held a door, or said the thing out loud in a room where somebody was drowning quietly, or told a stranger which platform. The act is finished when it is finished, and you go home. You are free to give something that finishes, and the size of it was never the measure of it. That is Luke 10:37, not a lowered standard, and His Spirit is what points out the near thing at the moment it is in reach.

And mercy stays yours to size. If today you have nothing, you have nothing, and I am not going to bill you for it. Some days the mercy available to you is a look that says I saw that, and that is a real thing and it counts. The size is allowed to be small. What is not true, and what the enemy of your soul would love you to keep believing, is that you have nothing at all and never did. Nowhere is that written, and the Spirit who lives in you is not standing there measuring your day against anybody else's.

One more, and it is the ground under all of it. You were shown mercy by somebody who owed you nothing whatever. That is not a nice framing; it is what the cross is. Christ met the trouble we were in and could not get out of, exactly as it is written, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is the same Spirit who moved Him toward it. Mercy in your hands is not you copying a good example from a distance. It is the family likeness coming out.