Mercy

For about 100 years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues—kindness or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good, or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such lopsided ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages to have had their pet virtues and curious in sensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim the mercy—for every Christian must reject with detest station that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as "humanitarianism" and "sentimentality." The real trouble is that "kindness" is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus, a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that "his heart is in the right place" and "he wouldn't hurt a fly" though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy; it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste or humble. –CS Lewis

Jesus spoke the admonition, “Be merciful, for your Father is merciful” in Luke 6:36, in the midst of teaching us (1) to love one another, even our enemies, and (2) to refrain from judging others. When we are merciful, we resemble our heavenly Father; we demonstrate something of His character to a world that so desperately needs to come to know Him. Practicing mercy is akin to ‘witnessing’, or in other words, testifying to God’s work in our own lives. Go out today and be merciful.