I'm joining in with the Mercy Mondays linkup hosted by Jenn at Hang on Baby, We're Almost...Somewhere. This week's prompt is Singing of His Mercy: where music and mercy have intersected for you.

I missed last Monday's post about what mercy isn't because I honestly couldn't think of a single thing to write. But when I saw this Monday's prompt about music I thought surely I'd have something to add. I often think in song lyrics. Songs will pop into my head when I hear certain phrases, and I'll sing words to myself to the tune of other songs at times. I listen to Christian radio frequently, and many of my favorite artists are Christian musicians. I also love hymns and even wrote my senior Honors thesis on the role of hymns in the Baptist church. But as a paged through my mental encyclopedia of song lyrics, I couldn't really think of a lyrics instance of the word "mercy."

A quick Google search solved my problem (as usual):

• Third Day sings, "There is hope for the helpless, rest for the weary, and love for the broken hearts. / There is grace and forgiveness, mercy and healing / He'll meet you wherever you are."
• Casting Crowns quotes Micah 6:8 and exhorts us to "Seek justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your god."
• Switchfoot sings a song called "The Economy of Mercy," which is on their album Learning to Breathe that I listened to ad nauseum the summer before my 10th grade year of high school (more on that later).
• Caedmon's Call has a song in which each verse explores what mercy is, from "the joy of my heart and the boast of my tongue" to "more than a match for my heart."

And then I delved into the world of hymns. Surprisingly, a search for the word "mercy" didn't turn up a whole lot.

•  "Depth of mercy! Can there be / Mercy still reserved for me? / Can my God His wrath forbear, / Me, the chief of sinners, spare?" is offered up by none other than Charles Wesley.
• Wesley exclaims again that "'Tis mercy all, immense and free, / For O my God, it found out me!"
• In "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," the "streams of mercy, never ceasing / call for songs of loudest praise."

The Baptist hymnal (of which I am the proud owner of a 2008 edition) has columns of songs under the topical headings "God, His Love, Mercy and Grace," and "Jesus, His Love, Mercy, and Grace," so I stopped there in order to not blather on about hymns forever. Google gave me plenty I could have shared, too, including numerous links to a Kanye West song "Mercy," which I chose to skip.

But this all so academic. Jenn asked us where music and mercy interscted for me. And so I think the Switchfoot song says it best for me after all:

"In the economy of mercy, I am poor and begging man."

Maybe I couldn't come up with thoughts on what mercy isn't last week because I don't really know what it is, after all. I don't have a dramatic conversion story wherein I used to drink and do drugs and I turned my life around through the mercy of God and His people. I haven't had life-altering controversies where I was compelled to forgive someone who had wronged me, or where I was forced to ask for deep forgiveness from someone whom I had wronged. And so sometimes it feels like mercy doesn't apply to me. It's hard to ask for mercy when I don't feel like I need it on a day-to-day basis. I don't wake up every morning singing, "Morning by morning new mercies I see" as in the hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness."

I'm at a point in my life where faith is not often at the forefront of my daily thoughts. The rhythms of a life of faith were comforting for me through high school and college, but I think I'm at a turning point where my faith needs to become something deeper if it's to continue being an enriching part of my life. And at the crux of the Christian faith is a belief in God's mercy: His mercy that compelled Him to send His only son to die a horrible death on a cross so that you and I wouldn't have to. Among all the other things you could believe, that's certainly radical. I don't know what that mercy looks like or feels like for me day to day, and I don't necessarily know the difference between mercy, and grace, and forgiveness, and all those other words that crop up throughout church services. I do think you can show mercy in the small things: a cup of coffee and a listening ear for a hurting friend, completing a task for someone who is overwhelmed, sending a bit of money to a compassionate charity you care about. But beyond that, I'm not too sure.

So I'll try and take a leaf out of Switchfoot's book as I navigate the economy of mercy: in the currency of grace is where my song begins. I'll keep singing mercy as best I can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6MFrTFfFp0

When I was growing up, dinner was a family priority. I’m an only child, so it was just the three of us. When I was born, my dad was skeptical about the whole fatherhood thing, but he said he would make a commitment to be home for dinner every night at 6:00. (And of course, he was very quickly won over by the grace and charm of my newborn self and abandoned all skepticism, right Daddy? ;-)) He would always ring the doorbell an obnoxious number of times and I would THUNDER to the door to greet him before we all sat down to eat. I don’t honestly remember what we ate or if we talked much, but I remember that we did.

As I got older and got more serious about swimming, dinnertime had to change a little bit. My practice was from 5:30-7:30, so my mom would try to make sure whatever she was putting together for dinner was ready to go before then, and we would all still sit down to eat it together, albeit later. Now that I’m responsible for feeding myself and another person, I have great respect for what a stressor that must have been sometimes, but I totally took it for granted back then. We did eat out just about every Friday, but it was still a family affair.

Flash forward to the hip, urban lifestyle of a 20-something married couple (yours truly and Andy, DUH), and dinner has become a bit more problematic. From what I’ve observed, it seems like many of our peers eat out a LOT! And certainly few of them (at least outwardly) seem to place the importance I do on a homecooked meal eaten together.

Andy and I mostly eat in front of the TV, on TV trays. I know, I know, this is supposed to be terrible. But honestly, with just the two of us, watching a show we both enjoy gives us something to talk about. We have periodically tried eating at the table together, and it’s just a little awkward. I eat slowly; Andy eats fast. We have plenty to talk about, but the meal isn’t conducive to drawing either of us out. So we have a docket of shows we cycle between, including Jeopardy and the news, and we’re always willing to pause what we’re watching if a point of conversation comes up (which it almost always does!).

But in the hustle and bustle of life, it’s easy for dinner to fall by the wayside. Andy will often work until 7:00 or later, but it varies from day-to-day, so I was finding myself getting stressed about timing dinner to be done precisely when he walked in the door. (News flash: this never worked.) A pain point in our day since getting married has been the instant of arrival in the evening. I am never the welcoming, effusive greeting wife I’d like to be, and Andy often felt like his mere presence had stressed me out. This was never a huge issue, but there was usually a moment of tension while we each evaluated the other’s state.

Add in the various activities we each like to do and the various groups we meet with, which have to be outside of business hours, and some weeks we ate apart more than we ate together! It dawned on me a few weeks ago that this was causing me stress. I felt like I placed a high importance on dinner and did my best to be home as often as possible for dinner, and to cook a “real meal” as often as possible, but this often meant I was thinking days ahead about when to cook what, and recently it often meant I was eating it alone because of things that came up for Andy. I also realized that the moment of tension upon Andy’s arrival home subconsciously had to do with the status of dinner.

So I did something revolutionary (hah!) and broached the subject with him. He was surprised to learn how important I viewed dinner together to be, which in turn was a surprise to me! I thought it was obvious. Another lesson learned about the importance of communication in marriage! We talked about how I would probably be more able and willing to be flexible with dinnertime if there was more of a norm to deviate from, rather than always feeling like I was flying by the seat of my pants. We agreed that we would set a goal time for dinner every night, and discuss it if it were going to need to change.

I’ve already found this makes me feel much freer with my time and my focus on dinner! If I know we’re slated to eat at 7:30, I know I can work on my blog until, say, 6:45 and not have to worry about being caught off-guard and unprepared by Andy’s arrival. And I also know that I don’t have to tackle dinner as soon as I get home from work. And the other day, I actually suggested that we eat at the restaurant where we play trivia, which is a practically unheard of deviation from the norm! And it was all because I knew that the next night I could reasonably expect we would eat at home together and I was okay with mixing things up.

I remember hearing in high school that the most common trait of high school National Merit Scholars was that they grew up eating dinner together as a family. We don’t have kids yet, but I’d say I turned out pretty well, and I think it’s worth putting a priority on something small that can have this type of long-term impact.

How do you handle dinnertimes in your family? What were they like for your growing up?

It’s been well-established on this blog how I feel about credit cards, as I’ve commented several times on the Dave Ramsey cash envelope system. Andy and I recently started using an app called LevelUp. At businesses that use it, you simply open the app on your Android or iPhone (which is linked to a credit card of your choice), hold it up to their space-age looking LevelUp scanner, and you have paid. My immediate thought the first time I used this was that Dave Ramsey would have a field day. It is scary easy. And if Andy and I didn’t keep such close tabs on our spending, I might be very, very nervous of it.

But it has a lot of cool features. For one thing, you can unlock a lot of deals with it. For example, at the coffee shop in our apartment complex, once you’ve spent $30.00, you unlock $3.00 of credit. That’s a free cup of coffee! From the app, you can choose to donate a portion of any savings you receive to a cause you support. And it’s accepted at a lot of places like food trucks and the mobile popsicle cart that lives in our neighborhood. I like the thought that if I’m out somewhere and for some reason don’t have my wallet, I could still pick something up at one of these places. Plus, there is less to fumble with at the register!

The app keeps track of all your transactions, and it also emails you a receipt immediately when you make a purchase. So as long as you’re savvy, it’s no different from using your credit card. Plus it’s secure: Andy tried to change the card linked to his account, and coincidentally he ended up trying to add that card that is linked to mine (which is a joint card). LevelUp wouldn’t let him do it, and it sent me a warning email that someone else had tried to link my card. Obviously, I wasn’t freaked out because it was my husband, but if it had been an actual case of attempted fraud/theft, I would have been relieved that it was nipped in the bud!

It obviously isn’t a viable method of payment everywhere, but the app can locate you and tell you what businesses near you accept LevelUp. I would venture to bet that more and more businesses will be going this direction soon. If you’d like to join the trend, you can use my referral code (230291) at https://www.thelevelup.com and we will each get $5. (Since we would both benefit, I don’t feel skeezy offering this at all!) Check their website to see if enough merchants around you offer this as an option to make it worth your while! $5 free money never hurt anyone…

I finally finished Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, which I started, oh, months ago. I had a really hard time getting through it, which surprised me. I love Anne Lamott. I think she is witty and I love her irreverent reverence. I absolutely devoured her memoirs on faith. But this one. This one was difficult.

Here’s my first thought: even though I have made the bold claim that I am a writer, as I said in that months-ago post, I had trouble believing that this book was for me. More specifically, I felt like many of Lamott’s suggestions were geared toward writing fiction, which I don’t do, and honestly have no desire to do.

Another thought is that I enjoyed each individual chapter as a stand-alone essay, but reading them all together was too much. They didn’t really connect to each other. There was no sort of cohesive narrative arch. I think had I read any individual one in, say, a college class, I would have been blown away. It was just reading them all in aggregate that swamped me.

But as always, I managed to glean wisdom from Lamott (4 Kindle pages of highlights, to be exact). Here are the two passages that I think are most relevant to my writing on this blog (which is the main writing I do right now):

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will be four billion different renditions. Some people will sing it spontaneously, with a lot of soulful riffs, while others are going to practice until they could sing it at the Met. Either way, everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exsists in each of us.

What this reminds me is that, every time I feel like I don’t have anything to add to the blogosphere, every time I think there are a million other people writing the same things I am–I am wrong. Because no one else is me. And Me is worth writing.

And here’s the other nugget:

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act--truth is always subversive.

Taking a stand on things is hard for me. It seems to have become harder as I’ve gotten older. Sure, I have opinions, and on every day things like what to have for dinner I have absolutely zero problem expressing them. But when it comes to politics, and religion, and economics, I clam up. I’m scared to express myself for fear of being shot down, exposed as ignorant, or discredited. But I’ve enjoyed the banter that has stemmed from my more decisive posts here, and Lamott’s directive here encourages me to keep trying. My voice may not be that of an expert joining the conversation, but as she told me above, it is still mine, and I have a right and obligation to use it.

I may revisit Lamott’s book as I keep writing, in bits and pieces as the mood strikes me, but I would have a hard time recommending it as a whole. Maybe keep it by the computer and flip through when you’re feeling stuck, or keep it near the bed to open when you can’t sleep. Definitely don’t count it out, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself slogging through. I’m glad I finished it, though, and it’s given me some things to ponder.

Bonus review: I LOVE Anne Lamott on Twitter. Her wit is well-suited to 140 characters. Be forewarned, she is unapologetically liberal, so don’t get your feelings hurt if you’re on the flip side of that coin. But she sure does have some gems.

Well, I entered all 5 of you who commented that you took the poll in a spreadsheet and picked a random row, and the winner is….

my aunt Nancy! It’s so fun to me that disparate friends and family keep up with my blog, and also that I’ve made some NEW friends through it.

I wish I could send ALL of you a copy of the book, because I think it’s that good. So check it out if you get the chance.

I have some ideas for posts that I want to share with you, so I should be back later this week with my usual insightful, witty commentary on the world. You know. The reason you keep coming back in the first place. ;-)

Thanks again for participating in my first readers’ poll!