Children have an innate sense of justice and fairness. If you spend any time with kids, you know the plaintive cry “It’s not fair!” surfaces with enough frequency to make a drinking game based on its utterance a dangerous affair.

Many times a week, I hear myself responding to those cries with a trite, “Life’s not fair.” In other words, “Suck it up, buttercup.”

True enough. And yet those words don’t take away the niggling rub that, well, gosh, it’s not fair.

And it’s not. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Contests and awards and subjective. Mistakes are common. The rain falls on the just and the unjust and all that jazz. (Matthew 5:45)

I’ve had this conversation with all of my kids at one time or another, and I will again. Take the spelling bee and my oldest daughter. I quizzed her on every word in the lists provided for study. We spent hours studying.

The big day arrived, and she knew every word posed to the contestants in every round Every word.

Except the one that she missed in Round 3.

Had she been seated one chair to the left, she would never have encountered that word.

Life’s not fair.

While maturity has allowed me to shrug off more of life’s unfairness, it still rankles sometimes.

Is it fair that you have a congenital disease? Short legs? Your dad ran off? You’re infertile? You got cancer even though you were super health-conscious?

Our desire for fairness – for justice – is why the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11) can get under our skin like no other. Why should the dissolute, irresponsible son get the party while the responsible brother works his tail off day in and day out? What gives?

The thing is, we only worry about what’s fair when we’re on the “losing” end. When something good happens, we seldom worry about its fairness.

It’s not fair that we lived beyond birth. It’s not fair that we live in the age of antibiotics. Or that the sun has risen every morning of our lives.

It’s not fair that God sacrificed His only Son that we may have eternal life. It’s merciful.

At the basis of our cry for fairness is pride. And how do you temper pride?

With a dose of humility.

The older I’ve grown – or maybe the more I’ve come to recognize my own insignificance and my reliance on God’s providence – the more I crave mercy over fairness.

After all, if life were fair, we’d be deprived of learning empathy. And extending mercy.

I’ve been grappling with the tension between justice and mercy since at least the mid-1990s, when I re-evaluated my thinking about capital punishment based on Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

When it’s my turn to stand before God with all of my sins exposed, is it truly justice I’ll seek or mercy?

Mercy, no question.

Theresa Linden illustrates this concept so beautifully in her supernatural thriller Tortured Soul.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but at its heart is conversion.

“It’s not fair,” she [Jeanie] whispered, gripping her blanket with clenched fists.
“No, not fair. Mercy.”

Tortured Soul by Theresa Linden

Nope, life’s not fair. God is merciful. Thanks be to God.

When it's my turn to stand before God with all of my sins exposed, is it truly justice I'll seek or mercy? Share on X

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