What I Have Learned About the Mercy of a Clean Cut

Most of the damage is not caused by the ending.

Most of the damage is caused by the refusal to let something end.

It took me most of my life to learn that.

The sharp knife

Years ago, when my wife and I were in counseling, the counselor was an older Jewish man. One day he reached back into his own tradition, a history Christianity shares, and talked about the knife used in sacrifice and slaughter.

It must be sharp, he said.

The point was mercy. When an ending has come, you make it as clean as you can, so you do not cause pain that does not need to be caused.

That image has never left me.

It made sense to me right away. I had pastored for many years, and I knew the sacrifices of the Old Testament well. I had also been a hunter. I raised beef cattle. I grew up around poultry, pigs, deer, turkeys, and cattle, animals raised and taken for a purpose. I understood that when a life is going to end, a quick end is a kindness. The opposite is torture.

Jewish law takes this so seriously that the knife must be razor sharp and perfectly smooth. It is checked by running a fingernail along the edge, before and after. If a single nick is found, even afterward, the act is invalid, because a nick tears instead of cutting cleanly. A medieval Jewish text gives the reason plainly: so that we do not cause too much pain to living beings.

We understand that about animals.

We do not apply it to our own lives.

What I held on to

I was married at 17. That marriage lasted 37 years.

I still love and care about the woman I married. It was not all bad. But we were young and unprepared, and the marriage was complicated by ministry, by my own unhealed childhood wounds, and by what each of us carried into it.

I was raised in a Southern, conservative world that taught marriage was permanent, and that you found a way to work through the problems even when the problems could not be worked through. I watched pastors counsel women to stay with alcoholics and abusers. I believed, in my own mind, that keeping my marriage together was essential to keeping my ministry and my place as a pastor.

So I held on.

Ministry was the second great ending. I could see it coming, and I tried to stretch it to reach a 30-year mark. By then I was worn down by the daily grind, carrying a physical illness, inside a marriage that was not working, and pulled in every direction by the needs of other people. I was completely and utterly exhausted.

And in that exhaustion, I did damage. To friendships. To years of service. To myself.

I would have been far better off listening to that counselor. Use a sharp knife. Bring it to an end quickly. Stop trying to protect some last piece of the ministry, or the marriage, or the appearance of success.

A cruel cut

I have come to believe there are two ways something ends.

A clean cut is thought through. It is decisive and plain. It hurts, but it can heal.

A cruel cut is jagged and slow. It is put off until we begin to sabotage ourselves because we do not know how to stop. It becomes public drama. It gets fought over. And very often, children end up in the middle of it.

A jagged wound becomes a breeding ground for infection. Infection does not stay where the wound is. It moves through the body and attacks the weakest places.

A cruel cut does the same thing. It becomes a breeding ground for anger. For me, that is exactly what it was. The anger got into every part of my life. My body. My nerves. My relationships. My mind.

A cruel cut debilitates.

A clean cut liberates.

The moment the anger left

I remember it clearly.

When I signed the divorce papers, the anger left. Instantly.

That told me something I have never forgotten. The anger did not come from the ending. It came from the refusal to end. The moment the ending became real and final, the infection had nowhere left to live.

We reached peace late

It has been ten years now. My family has chosen to make peace a priority, and the relationships among us are peaceful.

That is the part that convicts me.

We reached peace. We just reached it late.

If we had let things come to a merciful end sooner, we could have reached that same peace years earlier. We could each have done our own healing. We could have spent that energy on living instead of on keeping something alive that had already ended.

I do not believe those years were wasted. They gave me children and grandchildren. They gave me the maturity to finally see what needed to change. But I do know what the delay cost, and I would not wish it on anyone.

Why we hold on

We hold on for religious reasons. For ego. For family pressure. For appearances.

And underneath all of it, we hold on because we are afraid. Afraid of what is on the other side. Afraid that what comes next will be worse than what we have.

So we get comfortable with bad situations. We get comfortable with relationships that eat away at the fabric of our lives. We call it faithfulness. We call it love.

Sometimes it is simply fear.

I am 64, and I still struggle with this. There are things in my life right now that I know are over, and part of me still looks for the one ounce of good that might justify holding on. I am not writing this from the far side of the lesson. I am writing it from inside it.

What I have learned

A clean cut is not cruelty. It is mercy.

The ending will come either way. The only question is whether it comes cleanly, or whether we drag it out and do damage the whole way down.

I do not always know when it is time. That is a harder question, and it deserves its own conversation. But once I know, the kindest thing I can do is use a sharp knife.

Then I have to trust. I would call it trusting God. You might call it trusting the way the world works. Christianity speaks of resurrection. Other faiths have their own stories of life beyond an ending. Each of them says the same thing: there is something past this.

What is past this may be as good as what I am holding on to, or better.

If we trust Him for tomorrow, we do not have to be afraid to let go today.

The DKP Word 2026
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