The Weekly Mercies of Pam Ellis: Episode 1

Happy New Year! Welcome to a secret project I've been working on: a serialized story for my blog! I'm excited to introduce you to Pam and her fight to regain hope and joy after a hard year. Check back every Monday for new episodes.

3. 2. 1.

Happy New Year.

Instead of cheers and clapping, I sank to the floor and cried as if I had lost everything.

And considering the last year, it almost felt that way. I didn’t usually stay up to see the new year, but I wanted to make sure the dreaded year had left.

In the space of the last year I had watched my parents grow apart, my best friend had told me we couldn’t be friends anymore, the man I had secretly loved for years had moved to be part of a church plant far away. It was the year I had clung so fiercely to my faith, and yet had left me begging God for something anything good.

It had been the worst year of my life. Now, it was gone. I wished I felt more relief. No, what I wanted was to feel hope.

I pulled myself into my desk chair and glanced toward my bible and then at my laptop. Neither option seemed like it would offer much relief from the pain inside of me. However, I opened the laptop. I opened my browser and scrolled on social media. It was a bad habit I had acquired but wasn’t sure I wanted to fight it.

I paused when I saw a perky, flat-stomached girl holding up a sign with a title. “This year is full of hope.”

It wasn’t a page I followed but I took the bait.

We all need hope for the new year, am I right?

Well, let’s make our own hope!

This year, I am choosing to make time for ME a priority. I will be doing one thing each week to be creative and fun. I’m bringing back some of the fun of my childhood by finally treating myself to Disney Land I’ve always wanted but was denied. Will you join me in making hope?

I rolled my eyes and continued scrolling. What a shallow empty kind of hope. If hope wasn’t bigger then me, it wasn’t much hope.

That’s when I saw it. On a green background with goldish lettering, she saw His Mercy is More. Oh! Carol posted it. She had followed Carol’s account for years, but she hadn’t posted much in the last few months. I read the caption.

Hey friends,

I have missed all of you. The community I have here online is precious to me.

This has been a rough few months for me and I wasn’t sure how to share about it online because it felt so sensitive.

When I got married four years ago, I fully expected to be a mom within a year. I suppose, technically, I am a mother, but none of my babies have lived past the seven-week mark in my womb. We’ve sought medical advice and no one has a clue what’s going on.

There’s some other stress going on in my life with my family, but it isn’t mine to share. Like I said, this hasn’t been an easy few months, but I keep coming back to the phrase from the song I love so much

His mercy is more.

As I enter the new year, I’m determined to keep a record of God’s mercies each day to remind myself of all He is to me and all He has done. I also plan to do something every day to slow myself down and enjoy the beauty God has created around me.

Will you join me? I’m calling in the weekly mercies challenge

I stared at the post. Tears filled my eyes. I had no idea this woman was struggling to have children or had miscarriages. She was one of the accounts I hated because I saw her and her husband happy and adorable while the person I still loved was far away and had probably forgotten about me.

I opened up the comments and took a deep breath. I saw many others were signing their names like they were signing a contract. I decided to do the same. I needed this. I needed to change. I needed this year to be better than the last.

My fingers hovered above the keyboard for a moment and then I typed: I, Pam Ellis, am taking the weekly mercies challenge.

I let out a long breath, this was going to be hard. It would be challenging. However, I would start…right after I slept.

Working retail during the holidays was nutty, but January felt like a respite. I glanced around the storefront and let out a happy sigh. Not many people got to work at a book and tea store. My Weekend Is Booked to a Tea was located in a strip shopping center, right between a pizza place and a video game store. Not the kind of place one would expect a cute little store full of tea, Christian fiction, and classic books, but here we were.

I walked over and grabbed a Lavender Vanilla tea bag and plucked it in my travel mug and poured steaming water over it. I was so grateful I was allowed to help myself to two or three bags of tea a day as an employee.

I took a deep breath of one of my favorite teas. I adored lavender. I loved that it was calming as well as had a floral feel.

“Pam! The new notebooks just arrived!” My boss called.

Setting my tea down. I turned toward the back room. Lacy stood amid several boxes with a box cutter in hand. This woman and her husband Jared co-owed this place. Somehow, they made it when other bookstores were failing.

“Too bad these didn’t arrive for the Christmas season.” I opened a box and saw the beautiful watercolor cover with a verse printed on the front. I could have sold all of these in November and December.

“God has other plans for these notebooks.”

I didn’t understand how Lacy could always be so confident in what God had for her. But she was.

“And the discount we got after these came in late will allow us to sell them for less. So, I would say, it should be good for business.”

I opened another box and stopped.  A wood background with lavender sprigs greeted me. In a scrolling letter, the cover read:

His Mercies were New Every Morning.

I had found the notebook to record the mercies I found each day. I would start with my job, lavender tea, and finding this notebook.