Mercy

I have been ruminating and the ruminating is boiling so bubblishly that the rambling is now going to come spilling out of the pot.  So...

Did you hear Elder Uchtdorf's talk in conference?  The man has a serious gift in elocution.  He was talking about being merciful.  At one point he said that he could quote scripture and talk doctrine all the ding-dong-day but he still wasn't sure he'd get his point across.  But he thought quoting a bumper sticker he recently saw might help.  It said, "Don't judge me because I sin differently then you."

That got my attention.

There was a family I went to church with in Arizona.  The wife grew up LDS but got rebellious in her teenage years.  She ended up pregnant at 16 by her gang-member boyfriend.  The gang-member boyfriend, her husband now, said that when he got her pregnant he figured he would be with her for a while, but no relationship he knew of lasted too many years, so eventually he would move on from her.

The wife's parents apparently didn't flip-out.  The husband said that he was invited into the family.  They treated him well.  They encouraged him and helped their daughter.  He was intrigued.  Eventually they taught him the gospel and he believed it and his wife figured she better come back to it.

The daughter that the husband and wife had before they got married is now 17 and planning on going to BYU.  She is beautiful in every way a person can be beautiful, honestly.  She is real, she is faithful, she is determined, she is kind and she is going places - she gets a lot of that from her Mom and Dad.

It's the parents of the rebellious daughter that have me mesmerized in this story.  Because whether or not there is a happy ending with the rebellious daughter and the gangster boyfriend, the parents figured it out.  They're like real life Atticus Finches.  They seem to have a cutting wisdom that shreds fear and pride to smithereens.  Because I think that it is fear and pride that make people want to flip-out and usurp God's judgement seat.  And when I say people, yes, I'm saying me.

There is the fear, "Oh my gosh how big is this evil going to bloom and how fully is the stench of it going to fill my nostrils?"

And there is the pride, "Holy cow everybody is going to associate this bad thing with me and I think this bad thing is soooooo bad and I don't want to look bad because I think I'm really good, maybe exceptionally good...except for that one thing...and maybe the other thing.  But it's not like I'm not trying to be better, it's just hard, and it's not like what I do is one-one billionth as bad as what they did."

But there isn't the mercy.  The, "Whew, goodness me, thank all that's beautiful above that it wasn't me this time because even though I haven't been there-there, I have sooooooooo been there." 

I can certainly be the fear and the pride sometimes - especially when it comes to what my kids are doing.  It's kind of humiliating.  It's kind of a reason for this post.

But anyway that's why the comment drew my attention, the "don't judge me because I sin differently."

I want to not judge.  I want to remember my own nothingness.  I want to remember not to judge because how I judge is how I'm going to be judged.  I want to remember that the worth of every single darned soul is great regardless of what their t-shirt says, how many skeletons they have tattooed on their arm, how much they love music where the person is just kind of screaming, or whether they call my son "Pooper" at recess.

Of course there is always the law, the standard, that hard wall that can't be gotten around - I'm not advocating that we all chip in and bring it down with sledgehammers.  I want to know God's law and be willing to teach God's law (as far as I can figure it out and absolutely no farther!) because my heart says that his law is happiness and to deny that would make me feel pretty darned shoddy.  But I hope, oh my gosh do I hope, that I can forgive somebody who stepped all over what I thought was pretty darned important - even if they did a joyful jig of it right on my doorstep.  I want to be able to forgive that.  How cool is it anyway, to be told that you don't have to spank mankind so much as hug it?  Super-cool.

Here's to hoping I can be what I want to be.  Because for all that it sounds so easy, gosh it's hard.