Showing Mercy For One Another

By MAD21

Jack, a 9-year-old elementary student, is sitting at his school desk. All of a sudden there is a puddle between his feet, and the front of his pants are wet.

He thinks his heart is about to stop, because he knows when the boys find out, he'll never hear the end of it. And when the girls find out, they'll never speak to him again.

The boy puts his head down and prays this prayer: "Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I'm dead meat." He looks up from his prayer, and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he's been discovered.

As the teacher is coming to snatch him up, a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl filled with water. She stumbles and dumps the goldfish bowl in his lap. He pretends to be angry but prays, "Thank you, Jesus!"

Now, rather than being the object of ridicule, Jack is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out. When he comes back to class, all the kids are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The turn of events and the unexpected sympathy are wonderful!

But as life would have it, the ridicule that belongs to Jack has been transferred to Susie. She tries to help, but they tell her to get out: "You've done enough, you klutz!"

Finally, at the end of the day, Jack and Susie are waiting at the bus stop. The boy walks over to Susie and whispers, "Susie, you did that on purpose, didn't you?"

Susie whispers back, "I wet my pants once too."

In the moments of another person's discomfort, the Lord calls us to "dump the water out of our fishbowl" and do a kind act for someone else.

- Author Unknown

A good friend of mine sent this story to me awhile back. Whether it is true or not isn’t important, it still makes you think about what you would do if you were on either side of this situation. The story strikes a nerve for me, because I was one of those kids who was mercilessly picked on as a kid. I never wet my pants (thank God!), but there are many things that can happen that can cause the same ridicule from other kids. I once spent two hours hiding in the coat closet in 4^th grade because of something embarrassing that happened on the playground. This was after the kids had teased me to tears before we even went back inside.

As an adult, I was also put in the situation of Suzie. One year as a cabin mom at a camp, I had a camper who had wet the bed. She was absolutely horrified, to say the least. She was just bawling and wanted to call her mom to come and get her because she was so afraid of what the other campers would think of her. Fortunately, all the other campers were sound asleep and were completely oblivious that anything had happened. With the help of some of the other camp staff, we were able to get her cleaned up and back to bed with clean bedding to sleep in for the rest of that night. We took her things to be cleaned the next day. No one ever knew that anything had happened.

There was a girl I knew who went to school with me up through middle school. She was a quiet, smart girl who wasn’t mean to me, but never really ever talked to me. Several years later, she once told me “she was glad to have gotten to know who I was then, and not just the girl she saw in 4^th grade.” I know she was trying to say something nice, but it really hurt me. She had never even tried “to get to know the girl I was in 4^th grade.” But then, I guess there was a lot of fear that if she were nice to me, she would also get bullied. So I can’t totally blame her.

Reading this story, I would have given anything for someone to have done for me what Suzie did for Jack. To know that someone cared about me. I think just about everyone has been in the situation where they were either the victim of bullies, or saw someone being victimized and had a choice as to whether or not they would help them. Even as adults, how often are we in a situation where we wish someone would ‘take our side’ or just back us up when something is said or done?

Why can people be so mean to each other? Even something as simple as letting someone go before you in the grocery line, or letting another car merge in front of yours can make a world of difference in someone’s day. We should all work hard on showing others the same mercy that God shows us. I think we often forget that none of us is perfect. And no one deserves to be picked on.

Just because we are adults, doesn’t mean we never make mistakes. I often tell the story about a project manager I once had. A grown man in his 50s. He threw a temper tantrum in my office one day when he found out we couldn’t drop everything to work on his project. Seriously. He looked like my 3-year-old daughter when she doesn’t her way. I was waiting for him to throw himself on the floor and start kicking things. I’ll never forget it. It really just proved to me that adults are just over grown children without adult supervision.

So let’s all try to be more like Suzie and look for ways we can help each other. There are enough things in the world that are trying to tear us down.

1 Kings 8:50 “And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you, and cause their conquerors to show them mercy.”

Leviticus 19:18 “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.”

Comments

[Sam]

Great post, i will try and be more patient with others as i am sure they are with me.