Sparklers

You close your eyes and fall promptly to sleep, confident in whom you are, what your beliefs are, and what your future holds. You awake some eight hours later, your mind totally blank, with strangers taking care of you, in a land you know nothing about. You have lost all that you knew and all that you had hoped to be. You have amnesia.

Would you be able, without the filters of childhood and lessons taught; without the heartache of transgressions committed against and by you, without the confidence that comprised the sum total of you, be you?

Out of instinct, would you follow the same path of your birth? Or, would you begin anew, finally allowed to let the true you become your way of being? It’s the age old question of does DNA or environments determine who we are. Which would determine what you could be without knowledge of either of these?

Such is the story of Finding Mercy, written by Michael Landon Jr. and Cindy Kelley. It is the story of a young woman, born and reared in the south by a beloved father who is a plantation owner and master of slaves. He serves proudly in the confederate army, as does his daughter.

They both fight to defend their rights to maintain a life style that is the only one they know and understand. Yet, when this understanding is erased, Mercy becomes her own true self, following the end of the turbulent civil war and the subsequent reconstruction of the United States.

Mercy finds herself in a “no man’s land”. She believes she is loyal to the North’s cause, only to discover that she had actually fought and even killed to preserve the South’s side. Her life in danger, she flees hoping to find her true place and who she is. In the doing, she discovers many things about herself that she regrets, which ultimately provides her the choice to bridge the pain of her mistakes by helping those she has hurt. Forgiveness is really what Finding Mercy is about.

Finding Mercy is a thought provoking story. It causes you to think about what you would do if you woke up and had the opportunity to become the person you would want to be if all filters were removed. Beautifully written, it takes you back to a turbulent time of hatred and mistrust as Mercy finds her true self.