A Short Story: The Lord of Mercy, Or, The Story of the Repentant Adulterer

The cause of our sufferings are often our sinful choices, but we should never lose hope because God is always merciful and awaits our return.

He reached over, brushing her hair gently aside as he kissed her shoulder and whispered, “I love you, I will always love you, you are my one and only.”

In the disheveled back rooms of his mind that phrase sounded vaguely familiar…where had he heard it before? In shades of grey he saw his wife hand him a card just weeks ago on their 31st anniversary, himself opening it, absently glancing down at it….He had barely paid attention to what she had written, so it surprised him to trace the source of his glibly spoken phrase now back to that moment. But he was too confused to see, let alone own, the utter irony.

He had only known “her” for six months, but the feeling he had with her was something he felt he had never known before. Perhaps in childhood? Or perhaps not even then, because his father had been abusive, and absent, and he had had to “grow up” very fast. It was always about “responsibility”, “maturity”, and “handling everything”; but no one had ever asked him what he wanted.

Then he got married. And it was more of the same. Obligations, demands, being the yes man. Sure, she had wanted him as a partner in life, but, like many men, he never felt adequately equipped to deal with relationship stresses. Nor had he ever really learned “how to feel”, and “how to express feelings”. It was just “easier” to go along; and easier to hide when even going along seemed hard.

He tried to dodge the building resentment and bury it with more work, the one thing he knew he was good at. The one thing he felt some sense of control in. Deep down he felt he wasn’t “good enough”, so he self-medicated with alcohol. A “functioning alcoholic”; he pulled it off fairly well for some time, or, at least as fairly well as deceived people tend to perceive their lying constructs. But then it fell apart, he had mismanaged all of their financial affairs while pretending to “have it all together”, and attempted to cover up his failures with more lies. She gave him an ultimatum. And he tried harder. Life became easier in many ways, but then the responsibilities piled up again, and he kept taking them on, once again falling into his familiar role, but never really connecting with his own heart. Never completely or honestly admitting to himself or his wife that he did have limits, and he did have thoughts, and he didn’t always like how things were going, and, hardest of all, that he couldn’t handle all the demands of life. How he hated to even come close to admitting that! Even to himself, even quietly to God. He never even thought of getting on his knees and giving it all to God, even though he might have advised a friend to do just that. He felt “he had to do it all himself or he wasn’t a man.” Somehow repeatedly striking his head against the stone wall of frustration had earned a place in his convoluted definition of manliness.

So, unfortunately, he never resolved anything. The fear of feeling like a failure he managed to drink away, before it got too close for comfort. The emptiness of feeling like a mechanical soldier followed him day in and day out, but he could never name it.

And that’s when “she” came into his life. She gave it a name: “Just plain dumb”. And “old fashioned.” She was fun, she was a rule-breaker, she was sassy, and she encouraged him to “love himself” and to love life and to throw off all the “boring restraints.”

Little by little he gave in to first one taste of reckless abandonment and then another, and began to embrace this new sense of “I can do whatever I want.” This was fun, this felt free, yes, let me throw off the shackles of responsibility and all of the crazy stresses and pressures. “She”, the new she, wanted more to life than work…she knew what life was all about he lied to himself, as he got used to her distasteful foul language. With deliberate skill — if it can be called a skill to lead a man to his own undoing — she made it seem all about him, but it was really all about her. He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see through it, he was enamored. Not only with her — quite frankly an objective observer would not have found much about her that was very appealing — but with himself. He wasn’t drunk on alcohol as much anymore, but on “freedom” and on false ego. The freedom to break all the rules, to stay out late, to not come home at all, to make his own hours, to answer to no one, to not hassle with teenagers, to hear only good things… he was intoxicated. He didn’t see how silly it was for a man his age to act out the very things that just a month ago he would have unquestionably punished his teenage son for doing. And meanwhile, she played her game artfully. Yes, he was a fine catch. And so easy…. “So much for ‘Christian men’ ” she thought to herself, as she put up her year-round halloween decorations. Another thing he used to abhor and now got used to.

For all of his unhealed wounds and poor decisions, he did have some tender places in his heart, and unfortunately, she zeroed right in on them. After all, she was “a single mother with three young children who had been betrayed by men all of her life.” She was a Victim, with a capital V — at moments when she doubted herself, she told her story again to whoever would listen, to make sure it never cracked under the weight of its own fictitiousness.

Ah, and he was going to be the Prince Charming, the handsome prince to break this terrible spell of suffering that she had endured. No matter her age, no matter she could be his daughter, no matter the wife and son heartbroken and shipwrecked, no matter that she had a long history of this behavior in her short two decades of adulthood, no matter he was breaking principle after principle that he had once stood for. Now he told himself “That wasn’t really me, that was just what the wife wanted me to be, this is the Real Me.”

And yet, he never knew his real person. And that was the tragedy of it all. He traded in a false self that wanted to meet everyone else’s standards and didn’t know how to process and express otherwise, for a puppet playing into a much worse scenario. He didn’t understand the first 58 years of his life, when he had tried to “Be a good man” but lacked all self-reflection, and he didn’t understand the terrible deception that he was falling for now. He was a churchgoer, but he had not entered into a heart relationship with his Maker, and that left him vulnerable and ungrounded. He didn’t know that Christ came to “set us free” with true freedom, and that any earthly dream of freedom in a life of sin is a concealed enslavement. He didn’t understand that making honorable choices for the right reasons is the way to freedom, and casting off all of the rules was within his freedom to choose, but was going to have very unhappy consequences.

She had the enemy of souls on her side. She knew what she wanted. And why not? Her morals were not high and he was good-looking, in theory stable, worth some funds if she could get him to play her game her way, while, of course, thinking that all the decisions were actually his. “A good catch” she fancied and told her girlfriends, and so much to gain; she congratulated herself for how well he had fallen straight into the trap. And should he begin to weaken, she administered her recipes of admiration, guilt and pleasure in just the right proportions. Her own conscience had barely the force of a hoarse whisper in a crowded noisy room, since she had repeated her self-justifications to herself, him and others so often, day and night: “After all, a poor victim like myself deserves the best. The wife, of course, must be a witch, despite the floods of kindness she has shown me.”

“You are my one and only”, he heard himself say, while callous to the fact that he had made vows to another, and blind to the fact that he barely knew her. And oblivious to what was really going on in his life. He had tasted “freedom” and “fun” and licentiousness and did not know it was a cheap trick fantasy. He didn’t stop to reflect that for a teenage boy to believe these things is immaturity, but for a man his age, inexcusable, really. They made “plans for their future”, him never dreaming that all that they did together, and all that she said, was just the bait covering the hidden hook.

And he fell, headlong, treacherously into the pit. The dark misery that was now his life could not be compared in any way to what he thought was miserable before. He now saw and understood that he had been deceived. That he had traded in a woman of morals for a corrupter of souls. That he was not respected or credible in the eyes of his children. That he had lost so much of his former purity, decency, morality, integrity and honor. Those things that he could feel good about as a man and hadn’t even realized to what extent he possessed them. By the time he realized how far he had fallen, it was almost too late.

But God loves, and his Guardian Angel, standing afar off and weeping, at times came close enough to whisper in his ear “What are you doing? Do you really want these fleeting earthly so-called pleasures over all the joys of Paradise? Do you want to have a little so-called fun here, and then suffer in all eternity for your infidelity to God?”

“To God? Why to God?”

“Because in that day”, his Angel reminded him, “you will be judged on what you did to the least of the brethren as if you did it to God Himself.”

And the Angel pulled back the curtain of time and showed the Day of Christ’s Second Coming, and his wife and children in glory because of their pure hearts and many faithful tears, and himself in misery because he had chosen, of his own free will, the false freedom of putting all of his desires first, and not caring how many people he hurt and crushed along the way. And not caring how many commandments of God he broke, and how he had thrown his sacred marriage vows on the ground and kicked them away. And not caring how many people saw his bad example and themselves became weakened in their struggles to make good choices.

Making another attempt to reach him, and also not let him be confused by the demon of despair, his Angel looked straight into the eyes of his soul, and said with compassionate conviction: “Repent, you still have time to repent.” His Angel could see that after years of choosing sin the man’s soul was dull of hearing, but, still, his good Guardian never ceased praying that that seed of hope — small but mighty — would eventually sprout little roots and grow in the soil of the man’s heart. After all, not even an Angel of God can force a man to repent, he can only remind, tug, and encourage, but each one must choose of his own free will.

By now he was an old man. His “fling” had flung him away years ago for someone younger, as he had done decades before to his lawful and loving wife. His wife, who had never stopped loving him and mourning his departure, was no longer among the earthly living, nor were his children. He had no one. His church had closed some time ago. He had never known such horrible loneliness and darkness, as the unyielding voice of his conscience daily told him “You put yourself first. You made pleasure and false freedom your goal. You didn’t get help for your deeper problems but thought to run from them into the arms of your love of sin and pride. You wounded the people who would have gone to their deaths for you. And now you have nothing to say for yourself.”

Dismayed, with a growing sense of horror and regretful pain, he realized that he had not actually lived his life, his one and only life, which God had gifted to him. Through alcohol, sin, and an endless series of meaningless distractions he now saw that he had spent his precious lifetime avoiding living. It was hard to face this devastating truth. However, despite his many weaknesses and failures, he still had faith in God’s love in his heart.

Tired of ignoring the voice of his conscience that was more truthful than any of his justifications, he finally agreed with it, and then he saw what he must do next.

He put his head down on the hard cement floor of his small basement room — all he could afford after his foolish decisions and then reaping the results of them. And, for the first time in decades, or maybe his whole life, he wept from the depths of his soul. His heart wrenched as the deep wounds, first of sin and then of despair, crowded one by one into his memory and overflowed into his soul's consciousness. The sobs that wracked his now aging frame brought unexpected relief, as the tears seemed to literally wash away the accumulated filth of sin. He did not flinch, but faced each painful memory of his own poor choices more honestly than he had done all of his life. Through his sobs he had only one thing to say “Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy on me. Lord have mercy on a wretched and blind selfish fool.”

Towards morning, as the sun rose and tentatively peaked into his basement window, it saw a man in prayer, on his knees, with his head bowed on the ground before the icon of Christ. Near his head was his Bible, opened to the words, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

The next day he was buried in the pauper’s grave with no person in attendance except for the grave digger. However, he was not alone. His faithful Guardian Angel stood lovingly by, smiling gently with a sense of quiet victory. In his angelic right hand, he tightly held the scroll containing the man’s tearful entreaties for forgiveness, ready to accompany his soul to the resting place ordained by the Lord of Mercy.