I am linking up with the ladies of 5 minute friday today. Writers from across the country all write for five minutes on one specific topic. This week, the prompt is Mercy. I have been playing this encounter over and over in my head all day now… when I found out this was the prompt, I couldn’t wait to write out this woman’s story. She is all of us.
GO
Dragged from her adulterous bed and forced to the temple courts for judgment – She is charged with a crime worthy of death.
Her initial shame now shadowed by fear that consumes her heart.
Her head low, her worth long gone, her accusers raging… she waits.
“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”
Her heart beats violently as she listens for the sentencing that will begin a slow and painful death… one that she has been dying daily for years.
But there is no quick condemnation.
She warily lifts her head. Through the burn and haze of tear-filled eyes she does not see a judge towering over her, but a man bent low drawing in the dirt.
“When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.”
Her tense form braces for the first blow. She cringes as the sounds of rocks begin to fall all around her. Suddenly, she realizes that stones are not being thrown at her, but are being left behind.
Suddenly, a voice. “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no man condemned you?”
She looks directly into the face of love and is met with the kindest eyes the world has ever known.
“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
There, in the place of her accusers, remains a pile of stone. The pile that was intended to consume her now buries her old life… as a grave testifies of a lifetime left behind, the stones remain as a monument to the day she found salvation –
The day she encountered mercy face to face.
STOP
