The Interventions of Mercy

I wrote this piece for Selah Magazine and it just felt right to share here as well.

There are seasons in life when hope feels very far away.

Not the kind of days when things are simply inconvenient, but the kind of season where everything seems to unravel at once. Plans fail. Doors close. Prayers feel like they are not being answered, and the nights seem longer and heavier. In those moments, even strong faith can feel tired, and the future can begin to look uncertain.

Many people know this kind of season.

I remember in one of our small group meetings a while back, we were asked to share testimonies of how God had helped us through difficult moments. A woman shared how she lost her husband, struggled to keep her small business open, and had to move her children into a smaller apartment just to survive financially, and all this happened within a short period of time. She said there were nights she sat on the edge of her bed and simply asked God, “How do I move forward from here?”

Yet as she later reflected on that season, she didn’t talk first about the losses. Instead, she spoke about the small ways God sustained her through it. How a friend bought groceries for her family for a whole month and connected her with an agent who helped her find a more affordable apartment at just the right time. She also spoke about strength she did not think she had, but somehow found every morning when she woke up to face another day.
Looking back, she described those moments with one word: mercy. God had mercy on her.

Lamentations 3 is one of the most honest passages in the Bible. It is raw and unfiltered. Jeremiah, the writer, had watched Jerusalem fall and seen devastation up close. In the middle of pouring out that grief, he arrives at verse 23:
“Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22–23)
What strikes me about this verse is the timing. Jeremiah did not write these words from the other side of the storm, when things had calmed and he was reflecting on what had happened. He wrote them in the middle of the ruins.

This simply means that the intervention of mercy does not always wait for things to get better or for the storm to pass before it shows up. It shows up in the ruins too. Sometimes mercy is the very thing quietly carrying us through the storm, even when we do not immediately recognize it.
Many people think of mercy as something distant or abstract, but in everyday life it often appears quietly. It is the strength to take one more step when we feel like giving up. It is unexpected help that arrives at the exact moment it is needed, or waking up to another morning when yesterday felt unbearable and discovering that we still have the grace to continue.

These are the interventions of mercy.

The Bible reminds us repeatedly that mercy is central to God’s nature. Psalm 103:8 tells us, And in Micah 7:18 we read, That last phrase is powerful — God delights in mercy.