God Showed Me Mercy Anyway

I didn’t want it, but God showed me mercy anyway.

I have two pieces over at Aleteia on mercy.

They were inspired by my reading of the beautiful letter that Pope Francis wrote for the Year of Mercy, Misericordiae Vultus. If you have not read it…what are you waiting for? It’s lovely.

I believe that this Year of Mercy is going to be a tough year for us all. But amidst the difficulty I believe there will be abundant graces for conversion, our own and the conversion of others. It is a year for the New Evangelization.

My first piece “The Year of Mercy and Our Maimed Hearts” is about our own conversion and the link between mercy and forgiveness:

An excerpt:

One particular person hurt me almost twenty years ago. But I have never relived the injury with Jesus. I have not brought my maimed heart before God in prayer in order to allow him to heal that wound.

Read the rest HERE.

The second piece is about how God showed mercy to me and how we are called to show mercy to others, even those who don’t believe in sin or do not recognize sin in their own lives.

An excerpt:

One day I will never forget, I was getting ready for work and felt a sudden illumination of my conscience. It was as if I could finally see all my sins as God sees them, all I had done, all I was doing and all I would continue to do as a sinful human being. I collapsed, sobbing on the floor.

This was a moment of mercy.

But God’s mercy did not begin in that moment.

Read the rest HERE.

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