Mercy

For my non-Catholic friends, this past year has been a special year for the Catholic Church. It was the Jubilee of Mercy, meaning that we were called to reflect on Mercy and try to reintroduce it into our lives.

What is Mercy?

“Mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress” ~St. Thomas Aquinas

It’s fairly simply to be merciful towards people we like. A hurting friend is easy to comfort for a few reasons. 

First, you know them. You know what would hurt them, and you are aware of situations that may make their lives more difficult. Additionally, you know what makes them feel better. Whether it be a text message, sharing pictures of cute animals, or sharing a meal with them, you can easily find a way to feel for your friend.

In short, you understand your friends.

The second reason why it is easy to be merciful towards your friends is that there is little risk involved. You know that your friend will appreciate what you do for them, and they may even do something in return. Not only will your friend be happier, but you also will be happier because of it.

But what about the people you don’t know?

I can’t begin to describe how many times I have walked past someone that was struggling because I did not know them. The old man begging for change on the street corner, the freshman crying on the bench outside the library, the clearly frazzled waitress…I did not take the chance to help them because I had no clue where to begin.

The thing is-

It’s not challenging to show mercy towards someone else.

If mercy is simply sympathy for another human being, then all we need to do is show that we care. It doesn’t have to be a big ordeal.

Mercy does not mean that you fix the problem.

Mercy means that no person is alone.

The real question is, how can we show mercy to someone that has hurt us?

I personally believe that those that have hurt us are the ones that are the riskiest to show mercy to. They may not want it back, and you can get hurt.

Truthfully, the people that need mercy the most are the ones that have hurt someone else. We have all done someone wrong, whether we know it or not. Sometimes we outright offend someone, sometimes we physically hurt them, and sometimes we crush their spirits in a way they can’t get up from on their own.

Over time, these people become aware of what they have done.

And they are hurt. So very hurt.

Or maybe they never learn what they have done, but something hurts the person that hurt you. The world is rough. No one, not even the powerful people of the world, are able to avoid pain. The sad part of this is that the wrong-doers do not have anyone to care for them because they are the ones who hurt someone else. No one comes to their side. They assume that the wrong-doer is asking for attention.

And they are lonely. So very lonely.

You know you have felt this before. I know I have.

So then, what can be done to help the one who hurt you? How can you show heartfelt sympathy, or mercy, towards this person?

Forgiveness.

I have a very caring heart. I wear it on my sleeve, and while I may not let people all the way in, I do trust fairly quickly. Unfortunately, that means I am hurt far more often than I would care to admit. People see me as a happy little Christian girl, and they decide it is ok to walk all over my heart. 

They come to me when they need me, and then they just walk away, uncaring of the lonely soul left in the dirt.

On the opposite side of the coin, I also have a very empathetic heart. I have a heightened awareness to the many people around me. I notice every emotion in the near vacinity. And while I am an extrovert who loves meeting new people, large crowds and parties are difficult for me. There are just too many emotions for me to process.

When someone near me is hurting, I see it instantly.

I feel their pain.

Even the people that have hurt me.

I’ll admit, forgiving people is not easy. When I was younger, I was hurt badly by someone I thought I could trust. Instead of forgiving him, I would tell people all of the awful things he did, and I essentially alienated the kid.

I did not forgive him until a year later at my Confirmation when we walked up to Communion side by side and I simply looked at him and thought, “I forgive you.” 

I felt a weight leave my heart.

Sometimes to forgive someone, to show them mercy, does not require you to physically do something for them. Harboring anger and pain does not allow for the one that hurt you to move on with their lives, and it certainly does not help with your own healing process.

That boy did not need to hear my forgiveness in the moment. What he needed was a change in the world that reflected my mercy towards him. I never spoke ill of him again, at least, not in a way that could possibly affect his life. And as I grew up, I grew to forgive others sooner and sooner.  The people that hurt us need our love and mercy just as much, if not more than the strangers we encounter each day or our dearest friends.

There is one other person that is significantly more difficult to show mercy towards.

You

We all have this idea that we have to be perfect, and if we are not perfect in all ways, then we better be the best at least one thing. We have to have “our thing.” If not that, then we have expectations for ourselves in an area of our lives, in relationships, in a task we believe we are meant to do.

I was given a task not too long ago that I thought I could handle.

I couldn’t.

My failure consumed my thoughts and prayers. It killed me to think that I was given such a wonderful opportunity I could not complete my task. For the first time, I experienced failure in an area where no one else could help me. No one really understood because they did not live the same life as me.

I wanted to go home.

Because even if I fell, I knew that my parents would give me a hug, brush me off, and tell me to try again.

Hurt and confused, I fell apart in yoga class. I left the class and rushed to the Grotto where I collapsed on a damp kneeler. Over and over and over I apologized to God for not being the best version of myself. My body shook until it stiffened from the harsh winds rushing around me.

“What did I do?” I asked God.

He answered in silence.

I have written before about how I hear the most from God in silence. Because of my ADHD, my brain rarely can stop. I don’t rest. However, in the presence of God, my mind stops moving, and I am reminded that I can rest in my Savior.

In that silence, God’s mercy came to me.

I realized that even though I may not have done a perfect job, I did my very best. That was all I could do, and God knew that. He simply called me to be who I am. Sure, it was not the best feeling to fail, but I had held fast to His word, and I stayed true to myself.

I did my best.

Be merciful to yourselves my Dear Readers. Yes, you will fail. Yes, you will discover that your talents can only take you so far. Yes, you will make mistakes, hurt people, and force your lives to go in new directions. Even still, you are not a failure, nor have you lost everything.

You are trying your best.

And that is all you can do.

So when life is not perfect, remember that you are meant to be wherever you are. And if you are not sure what to do next, do not be afraid to just be yourself in that moment. Be your best, and you will make it through anything.

Forgive yourself.

Love yourself.

I love you Dear Reader, whomever you are. If you have hurt me, if you are my friend, or if this is me reading later…

I love you.

Broken Open

For those who do not know, I interviewed to be a FOCUS missionary before I applied to graduate school. It seemed like the perfect gap between undergrad and grad school; I would be meeting up with college students to talk about the Faith. It was something I did naturally at Belmont, and no one questioned my decision to apply, not even my professors.

Clearly I did not become a FOCUS missionary.

I have a few other accounts of what happened instead, but I would like to call attention what happened in my final interview.

“I can sense that your heart is very jaded Felicity,” the interviewer said to me.

This came as a complete shock to me. If you know me, I am filled with love. I care so much about those around me that I often lose sleep, time, and success because I am constantly trying to improve the lives of my friends, my neighbors, strangers even.

I thought that my empathetic nature came across very well in my interviews.

Turns out that I was wrong.

What happened to my heart was something that happens to everyone. Over time, with both positive and negative experiences under our belts, our hearts change. Everything around us is colored in based on what we are told is happening. Suddenly our simple hearts appear to be too weak to handle the world around us. The way we respond to situations, regardless of their nature, is modified in order to perserve our hearts.

In short, we grow up.

We grow up to believe that letting our true selves, our hearts, out to the world is just going to end in ruin.

I did a pretty good job of hiding my heart. Not only that, but I did everything in my power to protect the hearts of all those around me. If something bad happened to me, I did not let my siblings see me so they did not have to hurt. If I noticed someone flirting with a friend of mine, and I knew that this person was a bad influence, I would effectively remove them from the equation.

Pain could not possibly make the world any better.

But it is not just pain and sorrow that we hide from the world. Another issue that many of us face is a fear of sharing our joy. We assume that if we talk about something happy that someone will crush our spirits. We live for the honeymooon phase, and we do our very best to push away the real world.

After all, we are told to grow up.

No way could our joy be sustained. It’s childish to assume so.

The truth is, the only way that we will ever truly experience love is by letting our hearts become open. We have to be our real selves, and we have to be willing to let our true selves in for others to see. The alleged childishness within ourselves should not be hidden from the world, nor should we allow our struggles to dominate our thoughts.

Love has to be let in.

I learned this lesson first from my amazing family.

My advisor asked me if I was ever embarassed by my parents. The truth is, all of the children in our family have been raised to be shameless. If our parents kiss in the line at a restaurant, then we just smile. If my dad headbangs whilst driving down the street in front of my friends, then I join in (and I still do that in the lab).

Family lets you be yourself.

One hundred percent.

For those of my Dear Readers that know me, you’ll know that it has been exceptionally difficult for me without my family here at Notre Dame. I’ve been extremely homesick, and for the longest time I could not figure out how to feel better. Even if people were willing to help me, I did not want to accept their offers for coffee or dinner or anything really. 

I just couldn’t open myself up.

The door to my jaded heart was only accessible to my family and a few close friends. I knew that all of the love in my heart would be helped if I just opened up again, like I did when I was younger and playing with my siblings. Maybe then I could understand people, find something in this new space, and maybe even feel at home again.

Thing is…you can’t love unless you are willing to be broken.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~ C.S. Lewis

So I asked God to break my heart. Here’s the story that started on the fifteenth of September and ended on November fifteenth:

In a lab meeting on September 15th, and there was a lull in conversation. Now the Vaughan Lab is amazing in that we can almost always come up with an odd topic or two. To keep it short, my advisor somehow noticed that I was interested in another graduate student. I had no clue.

My jaded heart originally rejected the idea altogether. For five years, I had been listening to God and not letting myself go anywhere near relationships with people that did not fit my checklist. I was pretty judgmental.

My heart broke at the simple fact that I was not willing to let others in like I claimed I could. Thankfully my little brother told me to be more accepting, and my heart's door remained broken. My heart itself was left open, not broken, but open.

I chose joy even though it scared me.

Man am I grateful for that decision. Not because of the fun times, but because I saw that even though the world tells you that you cannot be happy or can handle life as it is, everything is so much better when you choose joy. I chose not to hide, not to run, not to justify everything away like I did so many times before.

My homesickness seemed to melt away as I played on playgrounds at 2 in the morning and laughing with my friends about the whole ordeal.

But remember, I did not ask God to just open my heart.

I asked Him to break my heart.

He did.

Now what I did not mention was that my heart was wide open to far more than this one kid. See, because of the joy I experienced from letting one person in, I found myself going to more and more people. By accepting others, joy filled my life.

Just as my family taught me to love by being myself, the numerous joyful encounters I had with these new people reminded me that it was ok to be open, to be real, to be joyful.

Day by day, my heart became more open. To the amusement of my advisor’s wife, I would dance around the lab in the mornings. I did not care. Even if the world was going to tell me that I was going to fail, that my child-like joy was a foolish persona, I knew that I was accepted and loved by the people I had let in to my life.

So when God broke my heart, He broke it wide open. Open to joy and acceptance and love.

There was no way to close it.

I chose joy that day.

God answered a ten year prayer because of that joy. Through the love of my family, the first love I ever knew, God answered the prayer I had been begging Him to answer. The only reason why I hadn’t heard His explaination was that I had not been open enough to hear Him.

Once that wore off, I was exceptionally homesick. Thus I learned the second lesson of what it truly means to have an open and loving heart.

Had my heart remained what it was, had I not let God break my heart, I may not have had the openness to share my life with those around me. 

On a superficial level, my lab found my sadness, and in response, they gave me more mentoring and more teaching and more experiments. It was an odd form of love, but it was because of their love that I am now able to say that the experiment I have been failing at for six months has finally worked.

More importantly, I grew closer to the women I met here.

Normally the girls I meet are the women I support. I rarely share my struggles, nor do I admit that I do not understand what is happening to me. This time my women supported me. These women, because I had already celebrated success and lamented failure alongside them, they opened their arms. They did not judge me for crying for two weeks about missing my mom. They did not care if I made up vindictive hashtags, nor did they care if I acted a little insane.

They just loved me.

On November 15th I turned to my little brother, and I asked him what to do with my remaining sadness. 

Basically he told me to stop lying to myself. 

So I stopped.

God broke my heart, not to remind me of the hardships of this world, but to show me just how much love can be exchanged if we let our hearts be open. 

I was homesick because I missed the love of my family. It had not gone anywhere, and I knew that. Not only that, but I knew that love was present in far more than what I thought before. It was in my undergrads, in my advisors, in my bio girls, in the bio guys, in my beautiful roommate, in the many many people I met every day.

Dear Reader, if you believe that you are too broken, too hurt, too empty for the world to take you in, stop lying to yourself.

You are loved.

Just let yourself be open to the people you encounter each day. Choose joy with them every chance you get. Even if you look stupid from the outside looking in, you will know in your heart that all is well.

Let your heart be broken.

Break it open.

It’s worth it.

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” 

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Plans

As I have written previously, I am the queen of making plans. 

I have two planners, tons of colored markers, sticky notes in cute shapes, and calendars all over the place. I plan out five alternative conversations when I need to talk about something important. When it comes to my future house, pets, and career, I have a perfectly crafted design that HGTV should be picking up on soon. If there is something to plan, then I probably have already considered it.

There are things you can plan

And there are things you cannot plan

You can make your meal plan for the week. You can make To-Do lists. You can plan your outfit for the next day, accessories and all. Basically, you can make plans for tangible things. If it is something that you physically can hold, then you can most likely plan for it.

When we try to make all of the plans for ourselves, we are let down. No person can say exactly when they are going to be promoted, nor can they say exactly when they will be married. You can’t even say who will be in your classes next semester with complete certainty. Intangible things, such as friendships, acceptances, promotions, or your coworkers cannot be planned out.

I used to think that I could control even these intangible aspects of my life.

Dance auditions, relationships, class schedule, leadership positions, whatever it was, I thought that I could plan when and where and how they would come to fruition. If I just followed a set protocol, then everything would work out as I wanted it to.

Of course it didn’t

The reason why was that each of these plans I made were dependent on other people.

No person can truly tell you what to wear or eat, at least in the adult world. No other person can dictate what you put on your To-Do list, or what brand of eyeshadow you use. Intangible things, such as positions of leadership, friendships, or even the school you get in to are dependent on other people agreeing with your plan.

There is one person in particular that can completely demolish your plans. He is by and far the greatest planner, but He is not always clear when He tells you what is in store. Instead, he comes in to your life, wrecks your plans in one fell swoop, and as you pick yourself up off the ground, you notice what lies before you.

That person is God.

I recently have had my life flipped, twisted, turned upside-down not once, but twice by God. At first, I had a pretty good idea of everything I wanted, and about midway through September, God openned my eyes to new possibilities in relationships and careers. Then, in the end of October, He flipped me over again, leaving me in more pain than I had felt in a long time, which is described here.

At the Biology Halloween party, I went back to my car and screamed at God, asking Him why He was flipping me over back and forth like my bacterial cultures.

Like I said, God is not particularly clear on His answers.

What I did get however were my friends rushing to my aid. Because all I need to feel better is laughter, one of my friends insisted on having twerk lessons, which I will admit was the highlight of the evening. Still sore from the heartache, I went through the rest of the weekend praying over and over again for God to answer my questions.

The struggles ended on Halloween.

I won’t go in to details for the sake of those involved, but at long last my position both academically and socially was made clear on Halloween. I will admit that there were quite a few tears in the moment.

Afterwards, I drove to my family’s favorite restaurant, Carrabba’s, to pick up my favorite chicken to feel better. My roommate, Barbara, came along with me, and I talked her through everything. 

If anything the conversation was a sort of prayer.

One of the issues that I brought up was something that I had been praying over since I was 13 years old when a boy broke my heart (yes, that indeed happened. I have been a romantic all my life.) For nearly ten years I asked God to explain certain things about my life, and He never really explained anything.

For ten years, I would ask God the same questions, unsure of His response, anxious that I would never understand His plan.

Still I prayed

At 7:50pm on Halloween, as I was driving Barbara and my chicken home, God finally answered my prayer. Ten years were ended by a difficult month, a rough conversation, How I Met Your Mother, and a text from my little brother Mark.

For the first time in over a month, I slept through the night.

Many people were surprised to see the bouncing happy Felicity singing “Happy All Saints’ Day!” down the hallway that Tuesday afternoon. I could not contain my joy. It was as if a little dark cloud over my heart had dissipated. God had been taking care of me all of these years, and I did not even have to ask Him to do so.

God works in our lives in ways we would never expect. His plans are beautiful, even if they are difficult to follow. There certainly was no way for me to know what God had in store for me these past ten years. I could not plan for the triumph and the heartaches, nor could I plan for the places I ended up and the people alongside me. 

Looking back it all makes sense.

Our plans, while good, may not be perfect. Yes, God did give us free will, but He also has provided multiple paths for us to choose from. He gives us the space to follow our own hearts, but He guides us to better paths, ones that fit in to His great plan, a plan that we will never know on our own.

I am so grateful for the low points, for they gave me greater understanding of this high point God has in store for me.

Ten years lifted

“Beloved:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us

that we may be called the children of God.

Yet so we are.

The reason the world does not know us

is that it did not know him.

Beloved, we are God’s children now;

what we shall be has not yet been revealed.

We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,

for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:1-3

I pray that you my Dear Readers do not grow weary in your lives, that even if something is unclear, that even if you are in pain, that you continue to fight the good fight. There is a beautiful, glorious, and perfect answer to all of your questions.

It is just going to take some time

And you cannot plan for the return call.