When Mercy Steps Aside

We speak about God’s protection so casually that the words begin to sound like decoration, a soft edging around the hard edges of life, something we invoke in captions and condolences without ever really sitting with what it means. But divine protection is not a slogan. It is a quiet architecture that holds far more of your life together than you realise. Think of an ordinary day: the traffic jam that makes you late and has you cursing under your breath, without ever seeing the crash you were never in; the small cut from a kitchen knife, the sting of blood that makes you frown and wonder why you had to feel that pain at that exact moment, without seeing the unseen vessel that needed your pressure to drop, the attack that never came; the nail in the tyre that costs you money and time, without revealing the road you were never meant to reach or the disaster that waited there. Divine protection is often nothing more glamorous than an interruption, a redirection, a delay, and because we worship control we rarely recognise mercy when it arrives disguised as inconvenience.

We like to imagine ourselves as competent, rational, in command of our days. Yet if you could see the full branching tree of consequences attached to each decision you make in a single afternoon, the hidden risks, the near-misses, the fragile threads that hold one moment to the next, the sheer weight of it would crush you. You were not built to carry that load alone. Most of the time you do not even know you are being protected, and that is the point: mercy does not need your awareness in order to operate. Some of us are granted, in the wreckage of life, a brief glimpse behind that veil. I have seen enough of those threads in my own story to know that if I am still here, it is not because I am unbreakable, clever, or strong. It is because I was carried through events that should have already finished me.

There is a truth I have lived with for some time now: when it is decreed that a man must break a leg, the leg will break. No amount of care or cleverness, no fortress of support, can erase what has already been written over a life. You can wrap a man in bubble wrap and surround him with the kindest souls on earth; if the leg is written to break, then at some point it will be broken. But although the event may be fixed, the way it arrives is not. A leg can break from a clumsy misstep on the stairs, from an accident in the street that draws strangers to help and binds people together, or from a deliberate act of malice, a blow chosen and delivered by another. In all three cases the decree is fulfilled, the leg breaks as it was written to break. Yet it would be foolish to confuse decree with innocence. The one who tripped himself bears his own heedlessness. The one who was caught in misfortune may receive mercy and compensation. The one who chose to become the hand that broke what was already written to break will answer for the decision to play that role. Destiny does not erase responsibility. To say it was written explains why the blow landed; it does not excuse who chose to swing.

This is where many oppressors miscalculate. They imagine that because the victim still stands, because the decree over that life kept them breathing and somehow moving forward, their own part in the story has been washed clean. They are wrong. The decree explains the existence of the wound; it does not absolve the one who pressed the knife. In other pieces I have hinted at these things: the hidden enemies who wore the face of family, the plots nurtured in the shadows of friendship, the power that was given as a trust and was weaponised instead. I still stand. That much is evident, if for no one else then at least for those whose efforts to bring me low only seem to have refined my posture. I do not stand because I am impressive. I am dust like anyone else. I stand because God willed that I should still stand, because there was a line between what was intended for my destruction and what was permitted to touch me.

In my life, divine protection did not always look like rescue. Often it looked like doors that slammed shut when others were pushing me toward the edge, opportunities that died in my hands only to reappear in a different shape later, plans designed to break me that somehow only broke the illusions I had been carrying about other people. At the time, I did not ask for the pain to stop, and there is something in that I want you to understand. I knew what time it was for me. I recognised the crucible I had been placed in. You can beg for relief, or you can ask for meaning, and though my lips trembled and my bones ached I chose the second path. I accepted that some parts of my suffering were fixed, that the leg, so to speak, was written to break, and I tried to focus not on bargaining my way out of it but on who I would become inside those fixed events. While I submitted to what had been decreed for me, others made a different choice. They did not merely watch a man fall down the stairs; they pushed. They did not simply notice where I was vulnerable; they sharpened their knives and aimed for those places. They did not accidentally participate in my breaking; they planned it, rehearsed it, justified it, and repeated it. For that, there is a bill that does not disappear just because I remained alive.

In an earlier piece I wrote of a reckoning that was on its way, a quiet turning of the tide in which the justice I had sought outside myself began to move toward me instead, as if reality itself bent in response to tears shed in silence. This is not a theatrical declaration of revenge. It is a simple notice that the time of warnings has come to an end. For years I spoke softly. I described the injustice without naming every name. I hinted at the theft without itemising every sum. I wrote of betrayal in poetry instead of in court documents and official complaints. I did not do this because I was begging for pity or because I thought that by painting my wounds in pretty language I could escape their sting. I was not asking for the pain to stop; I knew the hour that had begun for me. What I was offering, though I did not always admit it even to myself, was time: time to return what was not yours, time to step away from the role of oppressor and back into the role of human being, time to recognise that whatever power you enjoyed over me was on loan and not owned, that it could be revoked without your consent.

That time has passed. This does not mean I sit here pronouncing curses over your head or imagining that I can dictate to God how He should deal with you. I do not control the flow of divine mercy and I have no special access to the unseen ledger of your fate. What it means is something quieter and, I think, more serious. It means I will no longer stand between you and the consequences you have chosen. It means I will no longer soften my words to preserve your comfort at the expense of my own reality. It means I will no longer pray for ease and safety for you while you are still at ease in someone else’s ruin. You mistook my warnings for weakness. You misread my restraint as desperation. You heard my pain as nothing more than complaint. Now I release you to the gravity of what you have set in motion. Whatever ditch you find yourselves in, whether it appears as financial collapse, the slow erosion of health, the quiet unravelling of peace in your own homes, or simply a deepening inability to live comfortably inside your own skin, understand this much: I did not push you there. I simply stopped trying to pull you out.

It is tempting, when one has been deeply wronged, to daydream about justice as a kind of theatre, dramatic and public and perfectly timed: the sudden downfall, the humiliation in front of an audience, the long-awaited moment when every mask falls off at once. Real life almost never obliges us with that kind of symmetry. Justice rarely arrives with cymbals and lights. More often it comes as a series of small losses that no one else can see, as a growing restlessness that cannot be cured by new possessions or new victims, as doors that keep closing just when you thought you had finally secured your advantage. Sometimes justice looks like getting everything you thought you wanted and discovering, far too late, that none of it can drown out your own heart. I do not need to narrate anyone’s undoing. I do not need to catalogue which sense will fail, which comfort will be stripped, which illusion you will be left to drown in. It is enough to say that the shield of mercy that once bought you time has thinned, that the events written for you will now meet you with less cushioning than before, and that this is not in my hands but in the hands of the One who watched you when you were convinced no one was watching.

For those reading this who are not my enemies, who simply recognise their own experience in these words, I want to leave you with something a little different. The traffic jams, the small cuts, the broken tyres in your life may not be as random as they seem. The betrayals and losses you carried alone may yet stand as a witness for you rather than against you. The fact that you are still here, breathing and reading and capable of reflection, may say less about your resilience and more about the hand that held you when you thought you were falling through empty space. Do not romanticise suffering or turn your wounds into a performance. Do not glamorise being wronged as if it were a badge of honour. But also do not underestimate how much has had to go right in order for you simply to have arrived at this moment intact enough to ask what it all means. If there is an invitation hidden in all of this, it is to ask to be shown where you have been quietly protected, to ask to be shown where you have quietly harmed, to ask to be freed from any role in someone else’s decree that would place you on the wrong side of justice when the reckoning reaches you. As for me, I still stand, not as a triumphant victor and not as a permanent victim, but as a witness: to the weight of what is written, to the reach of unseen mercy, and to the quiet, terrible moment when mercy steps aside and simply allows truth to arrive.