Why Mercy Matters

WHERE LIGHT BLEEDS THROUGH - GRACE

The Stories Others Tell

There’s another version of my story being told somewhere, and it’s not mine to write. In that version, I am not the survivor finding her voice, I am the woman who disrupted a family, who took children from their father, who destroyed what others worked to build. In that story, I am selfish, ungrateful, perhaps even vindictive. The narrator of that version has their own pain, their own childhood wounds, their own reasons for seeing me as the villain rather than the victim.

I think about this often because truth, I’ve learned, is both singular and multiple. There is the truth of what happened, the documented facts, the witnessed events, the undeniable realities. But there is also the truth of experience, how each person processes those same facts through the lens of their own wounds, fears, and broken places. My truth doesn’t negate someone else’s experience of pain caused by my choices, just as their perspective doesn’t invalidate my own journey.

My father lost his own father at twelve years old. Instead of spending his teenage years exploring creeks and casting fishing lines, he was working to help support his family. Childhood was a luxury he couldn’t afford, play a privilege that poverty denied him. Life taught him that softness was dangerous, that vulnerability was weakness, that love was conditional on performance. The man who raised me was forged in fires I never had to walk through, shaped by losses I never had to endure. When I consider his story, I find mercy for the father who struggled to give what he had never received.

My former husband carries his own catalog of wounds. His family tree is marked by its own storms, patterns of dysfunction that preceded my arrival by generations. He learned what he lived, repeated what he observed, and brought his own survival mechanisms into our marriage. The behaviors that nearly destroyed me were likely born from his own seasons of destruction. This doesn’t excuse the damage, but it explains the source. Hurt people hurt people, and healing people heal people, we all fall somewhere on that spectrum.

I could tell you about the choices I made that caused pain to others, the ways my own healing journey created collateral damage, the times my fight for survival felt like abandonment to those who needed me to stay broken. Recovery is rarely a clean process, and my path to wholeness left debris that others had to navigate. In someone else’s version of events, I am the one who chose selfishness over sacrifice, freedom over duty, my truth over their comfort.

This is why mercy matters. Not the cheap grace that excuses harmful behavior or the toxic positivity that minimizes real damage, but the costly grace that acknowledges our shared brokenness while refusing to accept ongoing harm. We are all products of imperfect families, wounded by imperfect people, trying to heal in an imperfect world. We all carry stories of where others failed us, and we all leave stories of where we failed others.

Grace means holding space for multiple truths. I can acknowledge the pain I’ve caused while maintaining boundaries against the pain others caused me. I can offer compassion for others’ wounds while protecting my own healing. I can extend mercy to those who hurt me while refusing to minimize the impact of their choices.

We all need God’s mercy because we all need healing, forgiveness, and the chance to become better than our broken beginnings. This acknowledgment doesn’t make me a doormat, it makes me human.