Compassion in a Time of Confusion

The past several posts have belonged to a larger thread.

I’ve been translating work I’ve done from the “Past Authoring” section of the Self-Authoring Suite (by Jordan Peterson) into devotionals, taking my personal reflection and trying to make it broadly useful. It has been unexpectedly clarifying. Revisiting old memories has shown me how my earlier experiences quietly shaped later convictions.

That thread isn’t finished. There is more to say.

But some things shouldn’t wait for thematic continuity. This feels like one of them.

***

We are in a moment where the spiritual dimension of reality feels less abstract than usual. The confusion is louder. The distortions are more visible. The temperature, in almost every direction, keeps rising.

Jesus described an adversary who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). That is not metaphor alone. It is a description of intent. If he cannot prevent belief, he will attempt to deform it. If he cannot block salvation, he will try to hollow out compassion. Slowly. So that it barely feels like a loss.

One of his most effective lies sounds a great deal like discernment.

“You can be compassionate”, it whispers, “just not toward those people”.

And so categories form. People whose struggles feel too foreign. Too offensive. Too self-inflicted. Too culturally loaded. And it becomes easier to dismiss than to engage—easier, and in certain company, even virtuous-sounding.

But we should sit with something uncomfortable for a moment.

Titus 3:3 doesn’t leave much room for a clean “us and them”: “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.” Paul writes that in the past tense, but the point is that none of us approached Christ from some position of relative cleanliness. The ground at the foot of the cross is level.

Compassion doesn’t mean affirming everything. It doesn’t mean suspending moral clarity or pretending that sin is neutral. But it does mean that when someone returns—however fragile, however messy, however complicated their story—the Church’s response should look something like celebration. Because that is what heaven looks like: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7).

Do we actually believe that? Does it show?

***

There are afflictions today that would have seemed almost unimaginable a few decades ago. Some are culturally manufactured and reinforced. Some are deeply entangled with personal choice. Many are layered with shame in ways that are hard to untangle even for the person living inside them.

The enemy’s approach to someone caught in those afflictions is fairly consistent: “You have gone too far. You are too embarrassing. You are too much. There is no version of this where you are welcomed back.”

If he can’t keep someone from seeing their own sin, he will work to convince them there is no way home. That the door is closed, or was never open for someone like them.

This is where the Church has to be willing to say something clearly, not with a campaign, not with an argument, but with the actual texture of how we receive people.

The blood of Christ is sufficient. Not symbolically sufficient. Not sufficient for the more respectable categories of sin and struggle. Actually sufficient. For the person whose story makes other people uncomfortable, for the one whose choices were visibly destructive, for the one who is still not all the way out of the mess (Hebrews 9:14).

Jesus did not come for the people who had it together. He said so himself: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). The self-righteous were not His audience. The sick were.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether sin destroys. It does, reliably, and often publicly. The question is whether we actually believe that redemption is stronger. And whether the way we carry ourselves around broken people gives any evidence of that belief.

***

I don’t want to oversimplify this. These conversations are genuinely difficult. There are real tensions between truth and welcome, between holding a standard and being accessible to someone who hasn’t met it. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But the father in Luke 15:20 doesn’t wait for the son to make it all the way up the road. He sees him while he was still a great way off and runs. That detail is worth more than most arguments.

If the people sitting in the loneliest consequences of their own choices cannot imagine being received by us—if we are the last place they would think to go—something in our witness has gone wrong somewhere.

The battle is real. The enemy is not subtle, and the casualties are not abstract.

But mercy is also real. And it was always meant to be visible.

***

This was an interruption in the series. Next week, back to the thread.