Goodness and Mercy Shall Pursue Me

Goodness and Mercy Shall Pursue Me

“Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of the LORD forever.”

~ Psalm 23:6

On Friday, my best friend and I took a walk around Vanderbilt while my husband was having brain surgery. Ten years ago, we’d taken similar walks since that was the summer of her bone marrow transplant.

But two things were different: we’d never walked on Vanderbilt’s campus side, and we’d never walked with a little boy between us, who held our hands as he trotted through the puddles in his striped overalls and cowboy boots.

Magnolias towered in the Dickensian gloom, tiny saplings sprouting up beneath their parents’ protective limbs. Wet red cobblestones buckled above the unseen root systems of old hardwood trees.

We passed offices and old brick dormitories with gingerbread trim and ornate blue-green roofs. A sharp steeple pierced the sky, the clouds appearing like pulled lint. We walked toward this steeple. Delighted to find the chapel door open, we stepped inside and walked down the long aisle.

Stained glass blocks, colored like rock candy, decorated the towering walls, creating a false sense of sunlight. I walked up to the altar and, after a moment, lay on my stomach. Christmas pine needles, dried brown, dusted the tiled floor. I didn’t care. I lay there, and I pictured my husband in that same position: face-down as the neurosurgeon operated on the tumor.

I prayed that this time they would get it all, and we could move on with our lives without feeling like a scalpel hung in the air. My best friend began to sing, and the little boy in her care began to sing, too:

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. All the days, all the days of my life.

I sat up. I couldn’t help but smile while listening to that little boy sing out with such simple, childlike faith. Ten years ago, my best friend had lost her ability to have children due to treatments that saved her life. Without that loss, she would not have been so readily available to receive that little boy who needed such wide-open love.

It’s so easy to see now what my best friend couldn’t see back then. How God had turned the hardship of her life for good by providing a little boy with a refuge, by providing her and her husband with personified hope.

This morning, after a long night on the hospital’s pull-out bed, I showered and crossed Vanderbilt’s campus. Each sunlit glass block glimmered like spring as I once again pulled open those tall chapel doors. Yesterday, there had been no music. Now, the music played:

My Savior
He can move the mountains
My God is Mighty to save
He is Mighty to save
Forever
Author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave

Listening, I pulled on my mustard seed necklace threaded through my husband’s wedding ring, which they’d had him remove before surgery. I walked once more to the altar, gracefully striking my head on the decorative piece as I lay down. I heard a noise in the balcony and looked up to see a teenage boy in a backwards baseball cap, streaming that song on his phone.

Embarrassed, I bolted upright and strode down the aisle, sitting toward the back so he couldn’t see me from above.

I recalled that little boy singing yesterday, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.” My best friend had explained that that verse, translated into Hebrew, described goodness and mercy like dogs nipping at our heels.

No matter what we do, we can’t get away.

No matter how many times I doubt or fear or feel snappish and stressed, I still cannot get away from goodness and mercy. Even when my best friend and I were walking around Vanderbilt hospital after her bone marrow transplant ten years ago, goodness and mercy followed us.

Even when we were crossing the damp campus while they operated on my husband, goodness and mercy followed us. And even right now, as my husband finally, mercifully, sleeps in the hospital bed and I type beside him, goodness and mercy are following us.

My faith might waver, the path might be unclear, but goodness and mercy won’t let me go. Each day, if I just keep walking, I find myself being driven closer and closer to the Author of goodness and mercy . . . I find myself being driven closer to Love.

(I wrote this at the hospital on 1/5, but we are now home, and that goodness and mercy followed us even here! My husband’s now reclined and peacefully sleeping while I wrap up this post. Thank you, Jesus!)

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