Mercy in the Middle of the Mess

When I stepped through the girls’ bedroom door, it looked like I’d stumbled on a crime scene.

Half-dressed Barbie dolls lay strewn across the floor, shreds of clumpy white cotton balls littered the carpet like misplaced clouds that had fallen out of the summer sky. And a pool of bright pink nail polish silently sabotaged the only sliver of carpet untouched by the toy tornado.

I stood speechless in the middle of the mess, too tired to ignite in anger, too numb to spill tears.

It had been one of those days when motherhood felt like a two-ton bag of bricks on my shoulders, and now this. 

This mess.

I plopped onto the floor and sat in the middle of it all, trying to figure out what my littlest girl had been doing while I’d cleaned up the supper dishes and helped with homework.

“Mommy, I’m going to play Barbies before bed, ok?”

Maggie had left the kitchen with a happy skip, leaving her brother to tackle his math problems and her sister to practice her spelling words.

I hadn’t even thought to check on Barbie girl while I’d cleared the dinner plates and read “M” words off of the spaghetti-sauce-stained homework page.

To be honest, I’d just  been relieved to have a break from four-year-old chatter. 

With dish rag in one hand and spelling list in another, I had quizzed my sixth-grader and mopped the sticky wooden chairs. 

The black words had blurred on the stark white paper and I’d willed my tired eyes to stay open.

“Marvelous… I think a maid would be marvelous, don’t you?”

My curly-haired girl had stared at the dishes piled high on the counter and had taken a shot at the first spelling word.

M-a-r-v-e-l-o-s…

“It would be marvelous if you’d try again,” I’d responded, scraping crusty spaghetti noodles off of the top plate on the pile.

Lizzy had chewed on her pencil and huffed, her patience waning as the clock pushed fast toward bedtime. 

With a sigh, she’d tried again.

The drill had continued as her brother pounded the table in frustration over an equation that wouldn’t come out quite right, and I’d hollered for my little ones down the hall to put on their pajamas while we finished up in the kitchen.

“Mention…..” We were nearing the end of the spelling list.  “Will you mention to your dad that I could use a vacation?”

Liz had laughed at my sample sentence and had finally strung the letters together in the right order.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I’d cheered, lifting my voice above the clank of the porcelain plates jostling in the dishwasher. “Have I mentioned that I’m proud of you for learning these words?”

My tween had rolled her eyes and smirked, and we’d moved on to the last word on the list.

“Mercy.”

Before I could use the word in a sentence, Lizzy had created her own: “None of us deserves mercy, but Jesus gives it anyway,” She’d smiled and added, “That’s what makes Him so awesome!“

A few moments later, my wise girl’s timely words rang in my ears as I slumped to the ground in her little sister’s room, absorbing the disaster at my feet.

I stared at that blotch that looked like splattered blood.

Barbie girl waltzed into the room just then, her bright pink fingernails incriminating her.

“Mommy? My Barbies asked for a spa, and I told them I could make them all beautiful, so I borrowed your pretty nail polish, but when I opened that  lid, it just fell right out of my hand, and made that big splash, and now I just have a great big mess.I’m sooooo sorry, Mommy….”

Maggie flopped on the floor next to me and started to wail, and I considered kicking my feet and crying right along with my shrieking girl.

But something about that near-scarlet splotch made me pause.

I thought about  those words I’d penned to my Savior at dawn when I’d covered my journal’s empty pages with desperate ink, “I’m want to be more like You…”

Then, I took a deep breath as I headed to the basement to grab some mop rags.

But  before I left the room, I hugged my forgiveness-seeker, and offered my daughter the same gift that Jesus offers me every moment of the day–

Mercy in the middle of the mess.

 

‘Cause maybe, in the end, that’s how an imperfect mama begins to look just a little bit more like her awesome Savior.

Linking with Lisa-Jo and so many other lovely writers for Five-Minute Friday.  Today, we’re writing for five minutes about the word “mercy,” just pouring our hearts on the page, uncensored, imperfect, and real. Care to join us?