Part III: Practical Mercy

This is part three in a series on my experience paying down five figures of debt and the journey of healing that the Lord brought me on in the process.

A few months after my Consecration to Divine Mercy, my financial situation reached a breaking point.

A parking ticket that I’d been avoiding (there’s that word again – avoidance) caught up to me, and the City of Chicago was coming after me for both the cost of the ticket and the late fees that had since accrued. The total was somewhere in the realm of a couple hundred dollars… an amount of money that I simply did not have just lying around.

I want to pause here for just a moment. This is an experience that, I believe, God allowed me to suffer because He wanted me to feel a very material, very tangible need for His mercy.

Growing up in an upper middleclass family, small occasional inconveniences like parking tickets were never on my radar – largely because they were never a burden. The money was there, and they got paid – on time, if my mom had anything to say about it.

But when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and counting every penny (like I was at this point in my life), a parking ticket graduates from “small occasional inconvenience” to “insurmountable burden” very quickly. I cannot emphasize enough how I simply did not have $75 (or whatever the total was initially) to pay toward this ticket.

So, I avoided it.

So, when I got that letter in the mail that said I owed not only the initial charge but also hundreds of dollars that had now been tacked onto that ticket, I was beside myself.

And if I recall correctly, the letter threatened a whole host of consequences – refusal to renew my vehicle registration, revocation of my license… scary consequences that would present impossible obstacles to my job and other responsibilities.

Overnight, I became desperate.