Mercies Through Good Times and Bad
AM Psalm 40, 54 • PM Psalm 51
Neh. 2:1-20 • Rev. 6:12-7:4 • Matt. 13:24-30
“Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O Lord: let thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me.” Psalm 40:11 KJV
“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.” Psalm 51:1 KJV
Not long after the movie “Tender Mercies” was released in only a few major cities in 1983, John and I rented the video, fans that we were of Robert Duvall, and of the work of Horton Foote, who, following his highly successful adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote this screenplay for Duvall. As we watched, I nervously waited for somebody to get shot, robbed, or raped, or all three, in this modern western. As the story progressed, though, with its mellow plot, I substituted a different worry. How would the subject of Christianity, once introduced, be treated?
I needn’t have worried. “Tender Mercies” tells the story of a drunken former country-music legend, Mac Sledge, who meets and marries Rosa Lee, a young Vietnam widow who owns a tiny run-down gas station and tourist home in the middle of the dry, lonesome Texas plains. It’s a quiet, gentle film that tells a powerful story of second chances and spiritual redemption through God’s grace and the love of another human being.
Mac wakes up one morning from an all-night drunk in one of Rosa Lee’s cabins with no money to pay for his lodging. When he offers to work it off, Rosa Lee accepts his offer but only if he promises not to drink. Mac forswears drinking, but tension builds as he fights to stay sober and word gets around town that there’s a famous singer in their midst. We, however, see Mac as he sees himself: a lost and lonely man. When someone asks, “Were you really Mac Sledge,” he answers, “Well, yes, I was,” past tense. Divorce from his first wife, Dixie, now a country music star herself; the separation from their daughter that Dixie has enforced on Mac; and his doubts that he will ever sing again have deepened his anger over time.
After several months in this slow-paced community, working for the widow and attending the local Baptist church with her, Mac asks one day while they’re weeding the garden, “I guess there’s no secret how I feel about you. Would you consider marryin’ me?” Her words are straightforward and sparse: “I reckon I would.” Before long both Mac and Sonny, Rosa Lee’s eight-year-old son, make their profession of faith and are baptized, with Rosa Lee looking on from the choir. On the way home from church, Sonny asks, “Mac, do you feel any different now?” Mac declares that he doesn’t yet but that he expects he will—and that Sonny will too—typifying the movie’s unadorned and honest depiction of faith.
When Mac’s daughter, now eighteen, is killed in a car wreck soon after searching him out in hopes of a renewed relationship, he vehemently demands of Rosa Lee how God could let Sue Anne die while letting him live, and, further, how God could let Rosa Lee’s seventeen-year-old husband die in Vietnam and him live. “I don’t trust happiness,” he yells, “I never did.” Instead of easy answers, Rosa Lee says nothing, only keeping him company in his pain.
Earlier, Rosa Lee has said that when she gives thanks each day for the tender mercies God has sent her, she names Mac and Sonny first. The movie ends with her looking across the road to where the two are tossing a football, father and son. Life goes on, she knows, through good times and bad, but God’s tender mercies endure and sustain.
Written by Kay DuVal
Kay apologizes for not being able to write about “Tender Mercies” in fewer words. The movie is available for rental on Amazon Prime.