Tender Mercies

Bless the Lord who crowns you with tender mercies (Psalm 103).

I was entering my senior year in a military high school, focused and driven. World War II had just ended when I started high school. I loved the life of a student and my grades showed it. I was a staff-sergeant in the ROTC military aspect of my school. I will never forget the phone call with the news that I had been appointed lieutenant-colonel for my senior year – the second highest rank among the students. I was to lead three military companies of a hundred men each through my senior year. It was a feeling of sheer ecstasy – a landmark in my life.

We all have experiences like that. Maybe it’s that graduation from college with the degree to go on to a better life. Maybe it’s that job acceptance at a place of employment. Or maybe it’s that long-awaited phone call that the adoption has finally come through. There are no words to describe our joy. Or maybe we’re biting our nails in the third row back of the darkened auditorium when daughter Katie spells “masseuse” and wins the spelling bee.

Or, perhaps we’ve traveled more than a hundred miles to cheer the hometown team on and son Mike makes the final basket to win the state championship.

These are landmarks in our lives and we ought to treasure those singular moments. We glue the letters and certificates and newspaper stories in our scrapbooks. These are the big stories that are easily featured. But do we sometimes ignore the little tender mercies that surround us every day?

Counselors warn us that we shouldn’t depend on these highpoints of life to carry us through. One obvious reason is because they come so infrequently, and besides no one can live on such high planes of excitement. We’re simply not constructed that way psychologically.

Indeed, many people feel somewhat depressed after such singular experiences. There’s a huge buildup of anticipation and then a big letdown – whether we win or lose.

Yet we often ask God for the big gift while failing to see all the little gifts all around us. There is an old hymn titled: “There Shall be Showers of Blessing.” It speaks of wanting to hear the “sound of abundance of rain.” The final words of the chorus are: “Mercy drops ‘round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”

I think we easily set ourselves up for failure when we are pleading for showers, while ignoring the mercy drops that are falling all around us – those “tender mercies” mentioned in the scriptures.

What “tender mercy” examples?

A big one is just living in the USA, certainly not a perfect place, but one that has freedoms like no other place on earth. We have a relatively temperate climate compared to places like the African desert or the icy reaches of the North.

Another example is having plenty to eat. Our choices of food, both in quality and quantity, are unsurpassed and are light-years ahead of many places on our globe.

The clothes we can choose from to wear keep us warm and comfortable and are certainly “tender mercies”.

What about family? Certainly there can be dysfunctional families but, in general, we are blessed with parents and siblings who provide relationships on a daily basis. Every day on earth, children are being made orphans by war and other tragedies.

Our air and water supply, though becoming somewhat polluted, is still good enough to breathe and drink and keep us alive.

Tender mercies do not carry an “I Won the Lottery” headline. Sometimes they seem so small and trivial that we hardly notice, but they sustain us on a daily basis – if we are aware of them.

Thanks to God for the occasional shower of blessings but the “mercy drops around us are falling” and we have a lot of little “tender mercies” from God that we can be thankful for.


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