Some moments in a nation’s life feel like a turning. An inflection point.
We are living in one of those moments now.
Nothing changed all at once, mind you, but something essential has been revealed.
We have lost our moorings.
We are a country mourning many things at once: lives lost, trust broken, truth distorted, compassion strained thin.
We are not, however, mourning together.
We are fractured.
Fragmented by fear, hardened by outrage, exhausted by noise.
Rather than building bridges, as my late husband advocated, most have dug in, refusing to soften or see.
Augmenting their arguments with “what abouts” and “remember whens,” they replace careful discernment with false equivalencies that blur, rather than clarify, the truth.
Rather than suffer side by side and hand in hand, we compound the suffering of those we deem “deserving” of it.
The name of Jesus is invoked, loudly, but His teachings and example are trampled by those who would hoard rather than help.
Hoarding what is “mine,” and “meant for me.”
This is where the dissonance becomes unbearable.
Because the heart of Jesus and the tactics so often accepted in His name are growing further and further apart.
Jesus never made peace with the idea that some lives are expendable, merely for the sake of what is best for us.
He never taught that safety for “us” justifies suffering for “them.”
He never suggested that cruelty becomes righteous simply because it sanctioned by those in power.
Yet we live in a time when many who claim His name are willing to look away when people are brutalized, when human beings are reduced to problems to be managed rather than neighbors to be protected, when violence is tolerated and dignity becomes negotiable, so long as it belongs to someone “other.”
We have learned to speak of bodies as numbers.
Of families as threats.
Of suffering as collateral.
And then we dare to call it justice.
But Jesus did not confuse justice with dominance.
He did not confuse power with righteousness.
He did not confuse obedience with allegiance.
He moved toward people. Toward the broken, the weary, the frightened, the overlooked.
He welcomed those others avoided.
He listened when others dismissed.
He loved first, not last.
He told us exactly how to recognize Him:
in the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned.
Not in who we defeated.
Not in who we excluded.
But in who we loved when it was inconvenient, costly, or unpopular.
The test is never how fiercely we protect what is ours.
The test is always how faithfully we love who is not.
I have heard empathy spoken of as weakness. Toxic, even.
But I cannot reconcile that with a Savior who wept, who was “moved with compassion,”
who entered suffering rather than remaining outside it, untouched by its weight.
Empathy is not indulgence.
It is incarnation.
Love, in the way Jesus taught it, is courageous and costly. And still commanded.
“Love one another,” He said. “It’s how they’ll know you belong to Me.”
Not selectively.
Not strategically.
Not safely.
But fully.
We live in a time when cruelty is often characterized as conviction, and compassion dismissed as compromise.
But the Jesus I follow does not shrink His heart in the presence of suffering.
Nor should those of us who wear His name.
This is not about politics.
It is about discipleship.
It is about whether we will allow fear, power, and comfort to redefine what it means to follow Christ, or whether we will return, again and again, to the One who knelt in the dirt, touched the untouchable, and refused to allow fear to decide who deserved dignity.
We are a nation in need of moral clarity.
Not louder arguments.
Not harder lines.
But hearts made larger, not smaller.
Large hearts that envelop the “least of these.” For when we bless them, we bless the heart of the Christ we are called to represent.
This is the love we are called to carry, even here, even now.
“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it unto Me.”
𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐰 𝟐𝟓:𝟒𝟎