Your Partner Will Have Bad Days … And So Will You

Description

Somewhere along the way we forget a simple truth. The people we love are allowed to have bad days. Mercy can reshape our closest relationships, whether in marriage, friendship, or family. Human nature pushes us toward a quiet bias where when we make a mistake, we think it’s circumstances. When someone else makes a mistake, we think it’s their character. Yet Scripture tells a different story through the moment Rebecca waters the camels of the man she will marry. Swedenborg opens the inner meaning of that scene and writes that “doing mercy simply symbolizes marriage, and therefore marriage is a result of divine love” (Secrets of Heaven 3073). Mercy, then, sits at the heart of lasting love. It asks us to soften our judgments and hold one another with what the Hebrew tradition beautifully calls “womb-like mother love,” a compassion that gently cradles another person even when they are struggling. Real mercy lives in small choices. It appears when we embrace a little inconvenience for our loved ones, when we serve instead of react, when we remember we will need that same kindness on our own hard days. So the invitation is simple. Let mercy begin with us.