Accepting God's Mercy

Déborah Xavier-Mis considers our need to depend on God's mercy, grace, and help instead of trying to handle everything ourselves.

Our loving God is full of mercy toward us. To fulfill our needs and live a bold life we just need to accept His mercy! How beautiful and easy does that sound?! It is truth, and it is hard to accept. We have grown used to believing in our own “power” to solve our problems and we feel unworthy of asking God’s help and accessing his abundant grace and mercy toward us.

I have experienced this excess of confidence in my own power many times myself. The turning point was in my first year of parenting. When we had our first daughter, my husband and I had to live apart from each other for about ten months. When we became pregnant my husband decided to find another job so that I could stay home with our baby in her first year. My job did not offer maternity leave and the job he had was not enough to support us through the year without another income.

So we prayed and prayed, and after many applications and interviews he got a job! The only inconvenience was that this job was 900 miles away from where we lived. We bought moving boxes, started packing, and then we found out that we would not be able to go together as a family. (We had a different visa status at the time.) So when our first daughter was one and a half months old, my husband left.

The following ten months were filled with daily FaceTime calls, tons of tears, lack of sleep, struggles, lack of marital relationship, monthly visits (when possible), and isolation from God. I felt like the lady balancing spinning plates and I was on the edge of letting them all fall. In fact, during those ten months I did drop some of my plates: I dropped out of my PhD program, became a part-time worker, and left the service as an eucharistic minister at the church.

At that time, I had a wonderful neighbor who would bring me food and sit with the baby and me for a few minutes every other day; I had great friends who would stay with the baby so I could grocery shop, friends who cut my grass and kept me company for a few hours; I had a loving and faithful family that would check on me and pray for us.

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God was present in each one of these persons all along, but I could not see Him. I could not see past the struggle and suffering; I could not even ask for God’s help! I kept going to Mass on Sundays and receiving Communion, but I was not in tune with God.

God is working His ways, and I need to be patient, persevere in prayer, and surrender to His merciful LOVE. #catholicmom

Fast forward 10 months: my husband got another job that would allow us all to move together again as a family. And this new job would never had happened if he had not had the far-away-job in the first place. What I learned from this experience is that God is working His ways, and I need to be patient, persevere in prayer, and surrender to His merciful LOVE. Because God is love! And love is sacrificial.

Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7-8)

How can I access His love and grace towards me? By building a relationship with Him, which can be done by daily prayer, adoration, going to Mass, and so on. I pray that God help me to receive His mercy! Help me to feel worthy of His mercy and grace! Help me to recognize His loving and caring presence in my life, and to surrender my doubts and insecurities to Him, trusting that He is the one who can heel me and fulfill my need of love. I humbly pray that by recognizing my need for Him and accessing His mercy I can heal myself and shine His light upon others around me.