On the Systems We Inherit and the Mercy that Undoes Them
How a coin toss in 1950s Buenos Aires became a quiet act of rebellion—and a glimpse into the kind of mercy that rewrites the rules we live by.
My grandfather has always been larger than life.
Big shoulders, a heavy conscience, and bright blue eyes like cracked glaciers—eyes that seem to measure the world before fully letting it in.
Though he grew up in Argentina, the old country lives in him. His parents had left Friuli, Italy with only faith and a grit that didn’t rust. Argentina raised him, but the north of Italy shaped his soul.
By the early 1950s, he and his twin brother were in their early twenties, two wiry young men full of muscle and mischief, studying engineering, working odd jobs, sharing everything.
Though they were fraternal, you could tell they were twins—same quick wit, same steel behind the eyes—but my grandfather carried himself like the world owed him an explanation, like he’d thrive in whatever it threw at him while he waited for one.
Around that time, there was a peculiar military rule in place: if twin brothers were of age, the one who came out last would be drafted. Why? Because he was considered to have been conceived first.
By that standard, his brother was the one who had to go.
But that didn’t sit right with my grandpa. He turned to his brother—his best friend, his mirror—and said, “This isn’t fair. Just because you were born a few minutes after me? No. Let’s flip for it.”
I don’t know exactly what that moment looked like, but I picture it happening at night, in the narrow courtyard behind their apartment—a cracked concrete space hemmed in by laundry lines and rusted pipes. The city hummed low in the background, maybe a colectivo groaned down the avenue, maybe someone on the second floor was arguing over a radio still playing tango. The air probably carried the smell of frying oil from someone making milanesa, the bite of cigarette smoke, and that thick, dry heat that sticks to the back of your neck in Buenos Aires long after the sun disappears. I imagine they were passing a chipped enamel cup of maté back and forth, quiet for a moment, letting the weight of it settle.
My grandpa reached into his pocket, pulled out a coin.
“Heads, I go. Tails, you go.”
A coin held between trembling fingers, under a flickering streetlight in Buenos Aires.
He tossed it.
Time held its breath.
The coin hit the stone.
Heads.
Fourteen months later, he was stationed far from home, counting days by scratches on walls.
He never once says he wishes the coin had landed differently.
That moment has lived in my family like a quiet parable. One no one really teaches from or talks about frequently, but everyone remembers.
The older I get, the more it messes with me. Not just because of the drama or the sacrifice. But because of what it says about justice, randomness, and what we could do with both.
Most of us are raised to think of justice as mathematical. Fairness as transactional. Like if A = B, then all is well. But there are stories in Scripture and stories in our families that seem to live in the space between A and B. The truth is—we live in a world full of flawed equations. A world where the math doesn’t always add up.
In Ezekiel 18:25, God confronts the people:
“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?”
Even God seems to be saying: your definition of fairness is broken. Because fairness by the world’s standard often serves the one with more power, more logic, more language. But divine justice? It sees the heart. The hidden. The unbalanced scale.
We want the world to be fair.
But the world was never promised to be fair.
God never said it would be.
What He did say, again and again, is this:
Choose mercy. Choose the cross.
And that’s what my grandpa did that night—without knowing it, he chose the shape of the gospel.
He chose to carry something he didn’t have to carry.
He chose to make himself vulnerable for the sake of someone else.
He chose to question the rule, and still submit to the cost.
And then—there’s the randomness.
The coin toss.
There’s something almost scandalous about it. That something so important could be left to something so uncontrollable. But maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe randomness is only terrifying when we assume no one is in control.
“The great thing, if one can,” wrote Scottish author George MacDonald, “is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is, of course, that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”
My grandpa’s story isn’t just an anecdote. It’s a holy interruption. A quiet parable about the sacredness of small decisions.
Because that moment behind an apartment in Buenos Aires—a tossed coin, a shared look, a silent nod—shaped the trajectory of his life. Not because the military made him a man, but because the coin revealed the kind of man he already was.
And he’s still here.
Ninety-two years old. Still steady as a boulder. Still sharp. Still the kind of person who remembers the weight of that moment like it happened last week.
Still the kind of person who would flip the coin again.
The story doesn’t end with the coin toss.
It continues every time someone decides that their comfort isn’t more important than someone else’s peace. It lives on in every relationship where the rules say you don’t have to but the heart says you should. It whispers into our choices: When was the last time you risked something for the sake of someone else’s burden?
It makes me wonder:
Have I built a life where I only follow the rules that benefit me?
Am I willing to carry something heavy if it means someone I love gets to breathe a little lighter?
Would I have flipped the coin?
And if I did… would I have obeyed it?
In a world obsessed with outcomes, maybe we need to come back to the holiness of how we choose.
Not the result. But the heart behind the decision.
Because here’s what I’m starting to believe:
Some of the most sacred moments in your life won’t be shouted from a mountaintop. They’ll look like small choices made in quiet spaces. A coin in the air. A conscience at rest. A soul that says yes.
Notice this:
What coin flips have shaped your life?
What “fair” systems are you quietly being invited to question?
Where might God be inviting you to give something up, not because you have to… but because it’s beautiful to do so?
Sometimes what looks like randomness is actually an altar.
And the moment you step forward and say, “I’ll go,” something in heaven takes notice.
You may never be applauded for it.
But your soul will know: this is the kind of person I am.
And that will be enough.