Dust Where Mercy Writes

There are days
when the heart feels like a house
half-remembered—
doors open,
windows shuttered,
light falling in places
I have not dusted in years.

Something moves inside—
not loud enough to name,
just enough to rearrange
the shadows.

I once thought peace was stillness,
but stillness can be the quiet
of broken pottery
left where it fell.
Peace is something else—
a slow gathering of fragments,
a palm cupped under
what no longer holds its shape.

There is a beam
I carry without feeling its weight
until someone’s small imperfection
presses against it
and the whole structure shudders.
Then I see:
it was never their speck
that strained the frame.

Some people walk
with histories trailing behind them
like loose threads;
some with storms inside
that never quite break open.
I cannot read their weather.
I barely understand my own.

So I learn to step softer—
to let silence be shelter,
to let distance be mercy
when nearness bruises the soul.
There are paths God asks me to take
alone,
not as exile
but as protection
from becoming pieces again.

Sometimes peace means going back
to the threshold
where Christ kneels—
writing something in the dust
I cannot decipher,
only feel.
A reminder, perhaps,
that judgment rattles loud,
but mercy always writes lower.

He places a plumb line
where I had set a sword.
He turns the beam in my eye
into a bridge
that I learn to cross slowly,
bare feet,
no stones in hand.

And in the quiet,
I begin to understand:
peace is not the absence of edges
but the grace
that rounds them;
not the mending of every bond
but the refusal
to splinter another.

It is a narrow way—
threaded through the heart
like a secret door—
where you feel yourself
held together
by a gentleness
you cannot claim as your own.

And when I walk there,
I do not walk in pieces.

I walk
in the company
of the One
whose hands
never drop
what they gather.

If this poem stirred something in your heart, remember that the deepest roots grow from God’s Word itself. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 119:11). If you’d like simple, practical help in tucking Scripture into memory…

👉 Sign up for the free FAST Crash Course in Bible Memorization: http://fast.st/cc/21419