Lord Have Mercy

As a child growing up in the home of my grandmother, I remember three words that she spoke when she heard of catastrophic events, untimely death, storm damage, sickness and disease, hospitalizations, wrecks and other accidents, arrests and jail or prison time, marital problems, church fights and splits, and the like.  Sometimes with her head down, body bowed over, her left hand rubbing her forehead, sometimes needing to sit down if the news came while she was standing, wiping her hands furiously on the apron she always wore at home, she muttered three words -- Lord have mercy.  I didn't realize she was praying. I just thought she was saying something.  I came to realize that she was at a loss for words, so she almost always said the same ones -- Lord have mercy.

I have now learned that the three words are an often prayed prayer in the Bible. David, the man after God's own heart (see Acts 13:22), prayed these three words probably more than any other person in the Bible. David wrote what we know as Psalm 51 when the prophet Nathan came to him after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah, killed. The opening statement in that psalm is "have mercy on me, O God." Throughout the Psalms, David repeatedly speaks the three words -- Lord have mercy.

Oh, that we might be more like my grandmother and David.  When the issues of life are all around us and seem so overwhelming … when the news reports yell at us the atrocities that abound, not only in our neighborhoods but around the world … when as a nation, we defiantly shake our fists at God's laws and create our own to murder unborn babies and to affirm same sex marriage … when we neither know what to do or what to say or how to pray, these three words work all the time, every time -- Lord have mercy.