There are some books of the Bible that I naturally linger in. The Psalms have often felt like old friends. The Gospels always draw me back to Jesus in ways that surprise me. Then there are books like Obadiah.

If I’m being completely honest, I’ve probably spent more time over the years trying to remember where it is than actually reading it.

Twenty-one verses. One chapter. A prophecy against Edom. It doesn’t immediately feel like a place where I expect God to meet me. But I’ve also learned that Scripture has a way of surprising us when we stop reading simply to finish and begin reading to listen. Lately, that’s been my prayer more often than not. Not, “Lord, show me something new,” but simply, “Help me notice what You’re already saying.”

As I sat with Obadiah over several mornings, I noticed that I wasn’t thinking very much about Edom at all. Instead, I found myself wondering about the quieter movements of the human heart. Those places that are often difficult to recognize because they don’t announce themselves. They simply grow over time, almost unnoticed, until one day they begin shaping the way we see the world.

Edom believed they were secure. Their cities were built high among the rocks, naturally protected by the landscape around them, and there is almost a settled confidence in the way Obadiah describes them. It made me wonder whether pride is always as obvious as I imagine it to be. I usually think of pride as loud or boastful, but this seemed different. It felt more like becoming comfortable with our own strength. Trusting what we’ve built. Believing, perhaps without ever saying it aloud, that we’ll probably be okay because we’ve planned well enough or worked hard enough or surrounded ourselves with enough security.

As I thought about that, I had to smile a little because I recognized myself.

I like plans.

I like spreadsheets.

I like contingency plans for the contingency plans.

There is something deeply satisfying about feeling prepared, and I don’t think preparation is a bad thing. In fact, much of what I do as a therapist, a teacher, and even in the policy work I now find myself doing requires careful preparation. But somewhere along the way those good gifts can quietly begin carrying a weight they were never meant to carry. They can begin offering a sense of certainty that only God was ever meant to provide.

Perhaps that is why God is sometimes so gentle about loosening our grip on certainty. Not because He delights in uncertainty, but because dependence and certainty rarely grow in the same soil.

As I kept reading, I began to wonder if that quiet confidence had shaped more than the way Edom saw themselves. I wondered if it had also shaped the way they saw their neighbors. It’s difficult to move toward another person’s suffering when we’ve become convinced our own security is the most important thing to protect.

Then I came to two simple words that I couldn’t seem to leave behind.

Edom watched.

It is such a simple observation that I almost passed over it, but I couldn’t seem to let it go. They watched Jerusalem fall. They watched families flee. They watched people lose homes, security, and everything that had once felt familiar.

What stayed with me wasn’t simply that they watched. It was who was watching. These weren’t strangers. They weren’t people who had no history together. They were descendants of Esau watching the descendants of Jacob. Their stories had been intertwined from the very beginning. They shared grandparents in Abraham and Isaac. They had grown into neighboring nations, carrying generations of both conflict and kinship. They knew one another’s stories. One another’s history. One another’s vulnerabilities.

Somehow that makes the silence feel heavier.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes when suffering is witnessed by those who know us best. We naturally hope that the people who have shared our story will move toward us when life begins to unravel. We hope they will remember who we are beneath our circumstances. We hope they will choose compassion over old resentments, presence over distance.

And yet, if we’re honest, relationships are rarely that simple.

Families carry old wounds. Communities remember old injuries. Sometimes we convince ourselves that someone else’s suffering is simply the consequence of their own choices. Sometimes we stand back because we don’t know how to step across years of hurt. Sometimes we quietly tell ourselves that it isn’t really our place.

I don’t know exactly what was happening in the hearts of the Edomites that day. Obadiah doesn’t tell us. But he does tell us that they stood at a distance when people who shared their story needed someone to draw near.

I’ve found myself wondering whether that is one of the quieter invitations of this little book. Not simply to ask whether I would help a stranger, but whether I am willing to move toward the suffering of people whose history with me is complicated.

I suppose most of us like to imagine that if we had been there, we would have rushed in to help.

I’d like to believe that about myself too.

But life has taught me that moving toward another person’s suffering is rarely as simple as we imagine. Sometimes we don’t know what to say. Sometimes we fear saying the wrong thing. Sometimes we are carrying burdens of our own and simply don’t have much left to offer. And if I’m honest, sometimes another person’s pain asks something of me that I wasn’t prepared to give.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot these past few years.

Perhaps it is because I have spent time with students and friends in Ukraine, where suffering isn’t an abstract headline but part of ordinary Tuesday afternoons. Perhaps it is because I spend my days sitting with people whose stories have taught me how much courage it takes to simply tell another human being the truth about what has happened to them. Or perhaps it is because the older I become, the more I realize that everyone I meet is carrying something I cannot see.

Whatever the reason, I find myself less interested these days in asking who deserves compassion and more interested in asking whether I am becoming the kind of person who naturally moves toward another person’s pain instead of quietly standing at a distance.

I don’t ask that because I always do it well. I ask it because I know how easy it is not to.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I noticed my own discomfort with the language of judgment. The prophetic books don’t apologize for speaking about God’s justice, yet I sometimes find myself wanting to soften those passages. I wonder if that’s because our culture has made justice feel harsh, or because we’ve confused justice with retaliation for so long that we’ve forgotten they aren’t the same thing.

And yet, as I continued reading, I found myself lingering over another thought that kept quietly weaving itself through the book.

God sees. Not in the detached way we sometimes use that phrase, as though He were simply watching events unfold from a distance. Scripture has never described God as a passive observer. When God sees, He attends. He remembers. He moves toward His people. His seeing has always been deeply relational.

I wonder if that is why this little book felt less heavy the longer I sat with it. Obadiah reminds us that nothing unfolding on earth escapes the attention of heaven. God sees those whose lives have been turned upside down. He sees those who use another person’s vulnerability for their own gain. He sees those who choose compassion, and He also sees the moments when we quietly remain at a distance because moving closer would cost us something.

There is something deeply comforting about that, perhaps because the older I become, the more aware I am of my own limitations.

Every week I sit with stories I cannot rewrite, no matter how much I wish I could. There are losses that cannot be undone, childhoods that cannot be given back, betrayals that cannot simply be erased with the right words. Over the past few years, I’ve also come to love people living in places where war has become part of ordinary life, and there are mornings when all I can do is pray because there is simply nothing else within my reach. Even closer to home, there are relationships I treasure that remain tender or unfinished despite every sincere hope for something different.

Years ago, I probably would have experienced that awareness as failure. I would have worked harder, tried to solve more, carried responsibility that was never really mine to carry.

I’m slowly learning something different.

There is a quiet freedom in remembering that God has never asked me to see everything, hold everything, or fix everything. He simply invites me to be present with the part of the story He has placed in front of me and to love well, to speak truthfully, to show compassion where I can, and then to entrust what remains to the One whose vision reaches far beyond my own, trusting that what I cannot carry has never been outside His care.

By the time I reached the final verse, I wasn’t expecting it to affect me the way it did. Obadiah has spent twenty verses speaking of pride, betrayal, loss, and judgment, and then, almost quietly, he leaves us with these words:

“The kingdom shall be the Lord’s.”

I’ve found myself returning to that verse several times this week, not because it suddenly answered all of the questions I’ve been carrying, but because it gently reoriented them.

The world is still every bit as complicated as it was before I opened this little book. There are still wars that leave families wondering whether tomorrow will look anything like today. There are still relationships that remain tender despite our deepest hopes for reconciliation. There are still stories that end differently than I wish they would, and people I love whose burdens I would gladly carry if I could.

Obadiah doesn’t ask me to pretend those realities don’t exist. In fact, it does just the opposite. It looks honestly at the brokenness of the world and somehow still manages to lift my eyes beyond it.

The kingdom has never stopped belonging to God. Not when nations rise in pride. Not when families become divided. Not when wars leave people wondering where home has gone. Not when injustice lingers longer than we think it should. Not even when I cannot see what He is doing. That doesn’t make suffering smaller. It simply reminds me that suffering has never been larger than God.

Somehow, that feels different than simply saying, “Everything will be okay.” It isn’t an invitation to ignore suffering or rush past grief. It is an invitation to remember whose story this has always been.

I think so much of faith is less about finding certainty than it is about remembering. Remembering, again and again, that God has not stepped away from His creation. That He has not forgotten His people. That His purposes are not interrupted by the things that interrupt mine.

Perhaps that is what this little book has quietly been doing in me all week. It hasn’t given me neat answers or resolved every tension. Instead, it has gently invited me to loosen my grip on the illusion that I have to understand everything, or fix everything, or somehow hold the weight of the world together.

The world has never rested in my hands. It has always rested in His. And for reasons I can’t fully explain, that has brought a deep sense of peace.

I have a feeling I’ll be sitting with Obadiah for quite a while.

I was having lunch with a friend this week, and our conversation drifted to a book we had both recently finished, Beatitudes and Terror by Oleksandr Geychenko. We found ourselves lingering over one particular Beatitude, perhaps because it is one of the most quoted and, I suspect, one of the most misunderstood.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

I’ve heard those words my entire life.

Yet somewhere along the way, I think many of us, including me, have quietly substituted another word for the one Jesus actually used.

Not peacemakers.

Peacekeepers.

There is a profound difference.

As we talked, I found myself thinking less about first-century Israel and more about Ukraine.

Over the past two years, I have had the privilege of teaching pastors, counselors, students, and ministry leaders there. Every visit has changed me. There is something about hearing air raid sirens in the middle of the night, walking among photographs of young soldiers who will never come home, sitting with people who have lost family members, homes, and the ordinary rhythms of life that reshapes the way you read Scripture.

Verses that once felt familiar begin to feel startlingly alive. The Beatitudes are among them.

It is one thing to read, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” from the comfort of a quiet morning at home. It is another to read those same words while sitting across the table from people who long for peace more than most of us can imagine.

The people I have met in Ukraine are not naïve about peace. They know what war costs. They know the grief of empty chairs around dinner tables. They know what it means to live with uncertainty, to wake to explosions, and to continue serving others anyway.

What has struck me most is that they rarely speak about peace as simply the absence of conflict. Instead, they speak about justice, truth, freedom the protection of the vulnerable, the rebuilding of lives, and hope.

Perhaps that is because people who have experienced real violence understand something that those of us living in relative comfort can easily forget.

Peace is not merely the absence of war and biblical peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Working with trauma survivors has taught me something similar.

Over the years, I have watched well-meaning Christians encourage survivors to “be the peacemaker,” when what is often meant is, “Don’t make this harder. Don’t disrupt the family. Don’t divide the church. Forgive and move on.”

But asking someone to carry injustice in silence is not peacemaking. It is asking them to bear the cost of someone else’s sin.

The more I reflect on Jesus’ life, the more convinced I become that He never confused peace with comfort. He defended those others wanted to silence. He confronted those who abused power. He exposed hypocrisy. He protected the vulnerable.

None of those moments reduced conflict but every one of them moved people closer to the kind of peace God desires.

The Hebrew word shalom has always meant more than quiet. It speaks of wholeness, restoration, justice, flourishing, and relationships made right.

You cannot build shalom by pretending brokenness does not exist. You cannot build it by asking the wounded to remain silent. You cannot build it by protecting systems more than people. Real peace asks us to walk toward what is broken instead of around it.

As my friend and I finished lunch, I realized that Ukraine has forever changed how I hear this Beatitude. I no longer imagine Jesus blessing people whose greatest gift is avoiding difficult conversations. I imagine Him blessing those who enter broken places carrying truth, courage, compassion, and hope. People willing to stand between evil and the vulnerable. People willing to absorb misunderstanding without abandoning love. People who refuse both hatred and denial.

That kind of peacemaking is costly. It always has been. Perhaps that is why Jesus says peacemakers will be called the children of God. Because they resemble their Father.

The God who did not make peace by ignoring evil, but by entering a broken world, confronting it with truth, overcoming it with sacrificial love, and beginning the long work of making all things new.

Ukraine has reminded me that peace is precious.

Jesus reminds me that peace is also costly.

And perhaps true peacemakers are those willing to pay that cost, not with violence, but with courage, truth, mercy, and steadfast love.

One of the most important questions we can ask when reading Scripture is surprisingly simple:

Am I discovering what the text says, or am I looking for the text to confirm what I already believe?

The difference between those two approaches is the difference between exegesis and eisegesis.

Most Christians have heard these words before, but many have never explored why they matter so much, and perhaps more importantly, why they matter even more when trauma, fear, grief, or strong convictions are involved.

Exegesis: Drawing Meaning Out of the Text

The word exegesis comes from a Greek word meaning “to lead out.”

Exegesis seeks to understand what a passage meant to its original audience, what the author intended to communicate, and how that truth applies today.

It asks questions like:

• What is the historical context?
• Who was the audience?
• What literary genre is this?
• What do the original words mean?
• How does this passage fit within the larger story of Scripture?

Exegesis requires patience, curiosity, and perhaps most importantly, it requires the willingness to discover that a text may not say what we expected it to say.

In many ways, exegesis is an act of submission. Rather than asking Scripture to serve our conclusions, we allow Scripture to shape them.

Eisegesis: Reading Meaning Into the Text

Eisegesis is the opposite. Rather than drawing meaning out of the text, we read our own assumptions, experiences, preferences, fears, or agendas into it.

Sometimes this happens intentionally, but more often it happens unconsciously. We approach a passage already convinced of what it must mean, and then we interpret the words through that lens. The result is that we stop listening to Scripture and begin listening primarily to ourselves.

The danger of eisegesis is not that it always produces obviously false conclusions. The danger is that it can make us increasingly confident while becoming increasingly disconnected from what the text actually says.

Trauma and the Way We Read Scripture

As a trauma therapist, I’ve come to appreciate something important:

None of us come to Scripture empty-handed.

We arrive carrying the experiences that have shaped us: the families who raised us, the churches that influenced us, the relationships that nurtured or wounded us, and the circumstances that taught us what to expect from life and from God.

Those experiences do not remain outside the pages of Scripture when we begin to read. They often influence what captures our attention, what feels comforting, and what feels threatening.

A person who has lived under constant criticism may find it difficult to read passages about judgment without anticipating condemnation. Someone who has experienced betrayal may struggle to trust promises of faithfulness. A believer who has been wounded by spiritual authority may approach certain passages with understandable caution. This does not mean God’s Word changes according to our experiences. It means that we are human. We all read through lenses shaped by our own stories.

That reality is one reason humility is so important in the Christian life. We are not simply asking, “What does this passage mean?” We are also asking, “Are there assumptions, fears, or wounds influencing what I think it means?”

The goal is not to distrust ourselves. The goal is to hold our conclusions with enough humility to allow God’s Word to challenge, correct, comfort, and transform us where needed.

This does not mean that trauma prevents someone from understanding Scripture. God’s Word is not inaccessible to those who have been wounded.

What it does mean is that our experiences often influence what captures our attention and what we expect to find. We tend to notice the themes that resonate with our own stories. We may be drawn toward certain passages while struggling to fully receive others.

A person who has spent years anticipating criticism may find warnings easier to recognize than grace. Someone who has experienced deep loss may linger over promises of comfort while wrestling with passages that speak of trust. In counseling, we often observe that people see the world through the lens of what they have learned to expect. The same can sometimes be true when we read Scripture.

This is one reason humility is such an essential part of faithful Bible study. We are not only seeking to understand the text itself. We are also learning to recognize the assumptions, experiences, and expectations we bring to it.

The goal is not suspicion of our own hearts, but openness before God. It is the willingness to ask, “Lord, am I hearing what You are saying, or only what I expected to hear?”

The Example of Jesus

One of the most striking realities in the Gospels is that some of the people who knew Scripture best were also among those who struggled most to recognize what God was doing in their midst.

This was not because they lacked knowledge. Many of them had devoted their lives to studying, teaching, and preserving God’s Word. Yet at times their expectations became so firmly established that they had difficulty recognizing the Messiah standing before them.

Again and again, Jesus challenged assumptions that people held with great confidence. He invited them to look beyond tradition, beyond certainty, and beyond the interpretations they had come to accept without question.

His challenges were not primarily about intelligence or education. They were about the condition of the heart. The issue was not whether people knew the Scriptures. The issue was whether they were willing to let the Scriptures lead them somewhere unexpected.

That same temptation remains with us today. We can become so certain that we know what a passage must mean that we stop asking what God may actually be saying. The challenge of faithful interpretation has never been merely acquiring knowledge. It has always involved cultivating a posture of humility before God’s Word.

Why This Matters Today

We live in a culture that often rewards certainty. Strong opinions attract attention. Quick answers are frequently valued more than thoughtful questions. Whether in politics, on social media, or even within the church, there can be subtle pressure to speak with confidence long before we have taken time to listen carefully.

Yet throughout Scripture, God consistently honors humility, not a humility that lacks conviction, but a humility that remains teachable. A humility that recognizes the difference between confidence in God and confidence in our own understanding.

Such humility acknowledges that sincere people can sometimes be mistaken. It recognizes that our experiences, traditions, and assumptions can influence the way we interpret what we read. Most importantly, it leaves room for God to show us something we may not have seen before.

Perhaps one of the most faithful questions a believer can ask is, “Have I understood this passage correctly, or is there more here for me to learn?”

That question is not a sign of weak faith. It is often evidence of a heart that genuinely desires truth. After all, if our goal is not merely to defend our interpretations but to know God more fully, then humility is not an obstacle to faith. It is one of the pathways through which faith grows.

A Trauma-Informed Approach to Reading Scripture

A trauma-informed approach to Scripture does not seek to change the meaning of the Bible. Rather, it acknowledges that we never come to God’s Word as detached observers. We bring our experiences, our assumptions, our questions, and sometimes our wounds.

Because of that, it can be helpful to pay attention when a passage evokes a particularly strong emotional response. Fear, shame, grief, anger, or anxiety do not automatically mean we are misunderstanding the text. They may, however, invite us to pause and consider whether we are responding only to what the passage says or also to what it reminds us of.

Such reflection is not a departure from faithful Bible study. It is often an expression of humility. It recognizes that our experiences can influence what we hear and encourages us to remain open to what God may be saying.

Most importantly, a trauma-informed approach trusts that God is not threatened by honest questions. The God who meets us in our suffering is also willing to meet us in our uncertainty. He is patient with our questions, gracious with our misunderstandings, and faithful as He leads us into truth.

A Final Thought

Every person who opens the Bible faces a choice.

We can approach Scripture primarily seeking confirmation of what we already believe, or we can approach it with a willingness to be shaped, challenged, and transformed by what we find there.

That is one reason exegesis requires humility and courage. It asks us to listen before we speak, to learn before we conclude, and to remain open to the possibility that God may want to correct, deepen, or expand our understanding.

Eisegesis often feels easier because it allows us to remain in familiar territory. Rather than submitting our assumptions to the text, we subtly ask the text to submit to our assumptions. Yet the goal of discipleship has never been merely to accumulate biblical knowledge. The goal is to become more like Christ.

Perhaps, then, the most important question is not simply whether we know Scripture well. Perhaps the deeper question is whether we are willing to allow Scripture to search us, challenge us, and reveal what is true within us.

For in the end, faithful reading begins not with certainty, but with humility before the God who speaks through His Word.

When Jesus was asked to identify the greatest commandment, He did not begin with doctrine, church attendance, spiritual gifts, or moral performance. He began with love.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

In many ways, the entire Christian life can be understood as learning how to love well.

Yet for a word that appears so often in Scripture, love remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in our culture. We often confuse love with affection, agreement, attraction, niceness, or emotional warmth. We talk about falling into love and out of love. We measure love by feelings. We assume that if love is present, relationships should be easy.

But biblical love is something much deeper.

Love is not primarily a feeling. Love is an orientation of the heart that moves us toward God and toward others with courage, compassion, faithfulness, and humility. It is the daily decision to seek another person’s good, even when it costs us something.

That is why love is so central to the Christian faith. It is not simply one virtue among many. It is the soil from which every other virtue grows.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love. Not because love is the easiest virtue, but because it is the one that most clearly reflects the character of God.

Scripture tells us that God is love. In other words, love is not simply one of God’s attributes alongside many others. It is woven through everything He does. His justice is loving. His mercy is loving. His correction is loving. His patience is loving.

If that is true, then spiritual growth is not simply about learning more information or following more rules. It is about allowing God’s love to reshape the way we think, respond, relate, and live. The longer we walk with Christ, the more our lives should reflect His love in tangible ways.

What Love Looks Like in Everyday Life

When most people think about love, they think about strong emotions or significant acts of sacrifice. While those moments certainly matter, much of love is expressed in far more ordinary ways.

Love often shows up in the daily choices we make in our relationships. It is the patience we offer when someone is struggling. It is the willingness to tell the truth when avoiding a difficult conversation would be easier. It is extending grace to others while also maintaining healthy boundaries. It is listening with genuine curiosity rather than simply waiting for our turn to speak.

Love is often less about grand gestures and more about consistent presence. It is showing up when someone is grieving. It is noticing when a person feels alone. It is choosing compassion when criticism would come more naturally. It is celebrating another person’s success without envy and offering encouragement when they are discouraged.

At times, love is comforting. At other times, love is protective. Sometimes it means offering support. Sometimes it means confronting harmful behavior. Love is not passive. It actively seeks the good of another person.

This is where many people become confused. Love is often mistaken for approval, agreement, or endless accommodation. Some Christians have been taught that loving others means never disappointing anyone, never saying no, and never creating tension in a relationship. Yet that understanding of love is difficult to reconcile with the example of Jesus.

Jesus was deeply compassionate, but He was not endlessly available. He regularly withdrew from crowds to pray. He did not meet every expectation placed upon Him. He disappointed people. He confronted destructive behavior. He spoke difficult truths when necessary. Scripture even tells us that He did not entrust Himself to everyone because He understood the human heart.

Healthy boundaries, therefore, are not obstacles to love. In many situations, they are one expression of love. Boundaries help us protect what is valuable, steward our responsibilities wisely, and engage others honestly rather than resentfully.

Love seeks the genuine good of another person. Sometimes that requires comfort and reassurance. Sometimes it requires honesty and accountability. Most often, it requires the wisdom to know which is needed in a particular moment.

Why Love Can Be So Difficult

If love is central to the Christian life, why do we often find it so challenging?

The answer is not usually a lack of knowledge. Most people already know they should be patient, kind, forgiving, and compassionate. The struggle is not understanding what love requires. The struggle is putting it into practice, especially when we feel hurt, threatened, disappointed, or afraid.

Part of the challenge is that love asks something of us. It asks us to move beyond our instinct to protect ourselves. It invites us to extend grace when we would rather withdraw, attack, or keep score. It calls us to care about another person’s well-being even when doing so is inconvenient or costly.

For many of us, these challenges are made more complicated by our life experiences. The relationships that shaped us early in life influence how we understand trust, safety, connection, and vulnerability. If relationships were unpredictable, critical, neglectful, or unsafe, we often develop ways of protecting ourselves.

Some people learn to please others in order to maintain connection. Others strive for perfection, believing they must earn acceptance. Some become highly independent and avoid relying on anyone. Others respond with anger, control, or emotional distance. These strategies often develop for understandable reasons and may even help us navigate difficult circumstances.

The problem is that what helps us survive does not always help us love well.

Love requires a degree of openness and vulnerability. It requires the willingness to trust, to forgive, to repair misunderstandings, and to remain present when relationships become difficult. None of these things come naturally when we have been hurt.

This is one reason spiritual growth cannot be reduced to behavior modification. We are not simply trying harder to act loving. God is working to transform our hearts, our minds, and even the ways we relate to one another. The process is often slow and sometimes uncomfortable because it involves healing as well as growth.

This may help explain why love appears first in Paul’s description of the fruit of the Spirit. Love is not merely one characteristic among many. It is the foundation from which patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, and the other fruits emerge. As God’s love takes deeper root within us, those qualities begin to grow as well.

The good news is that God does not ask us to manufacture this kind of love on our own. He invites us to receive His love, be transformed by it, and gradually learn to extend it to others.

Practicing Love Every Day

If love is the central work of the Christian life, then an important question follows: How do we actually grow in it?

The answer begins with something that may seem surprising. Before we can consistently extend love to others, we must learn to receive God’s love ourselves.

Many Christians spend years trying to be more loving through effort alone. They work harder, serve more, volunteer more, and strive to become better people. While those things can be valuable, they are difficult to sustain if they are disconnected from the reality of God’s love for us.

The Gospel begins with the good news that we are loved before we earn it. We are loved before we prove ourselves, before we have everything figured out, and before our transformation is complete. God’s love is not a reward for spiritual maturity. It is the foundation from which spiritual maturity grows.

As that truth begins to take root, it changes the way we relate to other people. We become less defensive because our worth is no longer dependent on being right. We become more patient because we recognize how patient God has been with us. We become more willing to forgive because we understand the forgiveness we ourselves have received. Love becomes less about managing our image and more about genuinely caring for others.

Like any aspect of spiritual formation, love develops through practice. We learn to love by choosing loving actions in ordinary moments. We pause before reacting in anger. We listen carefully instead of assuming. We pray for people who frustrate us. We offer encouragement, extend forgiveness, and look for opportunities to serve without needing recognition in return.

These practices may seem small, but spiritual growth is often built through small acts repeated over time. Just as physical strength develops through consistent exercise, love grows through consistent practice. Day by day, choice by choice, God uses ordinary moments to shape us into people who increasingly reflect the character of Christ.

The goal is not perfection. There will be days when we fall short. The invitation is simply to keep returning to the love we have received and allowing it to shape the love we extend to others.

The Measure of a Life

As we move through life, it is easy to become focused on achievement, productivity, recognition, and responsibility. Many of these things are good in themselves. We are called to work faithfully, use our gifts well, and serve others with excellence. Yet Scripture consistently reminds us that these things are not the ultimate measure of a life.

Over time, positions change. Careers end. Accomplishments that once seemed significant gradually become distant memories. Even the things we spend years building eventually pass into the hands of others.

What endures is something deeper.

When Jesus spoke about the greatest commandments, He did not point people first toward accomplishment or influence. He pointed them toward love for God and love for others. Again and again, His teaching returned to relationships, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, service, and faithfulness.

This does not mean that knowledge, leadership, or success are unimportant. Rather, it means they are not ends in themselves. They are opportunities to express love. The question is not simply what we accomplished, but how we treated people along the way. Did our lives reflect the character of Christ? Did we grow in compassion, humility, patience, and grace? Did the people around us experience something of God’s love through our presence?

In many ways, the Christian life can be understood as a lifelong process of learning to love well. We will not do this perfectly. We will make mistakes, miss opportunities, and sometimes fall short of the people we hope to become. Yet God’s invitation remains the same.

Each day presents another opportunity to receive His love, to be transformed by it, and to extend it to others.

Perhaps that is one of the simplest ways to think about spiritual growth. Over time, are we becoming people who love more like Christ?

If the answer is yes, then regardless of our titles, accomplishments, or recognition, we are moving in the right direction.

After writing a Substack post, I realized I wanted to more fully explore the theology behind it and so below is what came from redrafting that post to include my thoughts on theology.

One of the things that has struck me over the years as a therapist is how often people think violence begins with a violent act.

When we hear about domestic violence, racial violence, child abuse, or even bullying, our attention naturally goes to the behavior itself. We focus on what happened, who did it, and how it could have been prevented. Those are important questions. But they are not the only questions worth asking.

The longer I have worked with trauma survivors, the more convinced I have become that violence rarely starts with violence. More often, it begins with beliefs about power, worth, and whose needs matter.

I have worked with survivors from many different backgrounds and life experiences. Some grew up in abusive homes. Some survived violent relationships. Some experienced discrimination or exclusion because of their race, culture, gender, or other aspects of their identity. Their stories were very different, but I found myself noticing a similar theme beneath many of them.

At some point, someone decided, whether consciously or unconsciously, that this person’s humanity mattered a little less.

That may sound like an overstatement, but stay with me for a moment.

When I sit with someone who has survived domestic violence, the issue is rarely just anger. Most people experience anger and never become abusive. The deeper issue is often a belief that one person has the right to control another person. The abusive behavior grows from a mindset that elevates one person’s needs, preferences, or authority above someone else’s autonomy and dignity.

The same pattern can be found in many forms of racial violence and discrimination.

I am not suggesting that everyone who holds a stereotype or a bias is violent. Human beings are more complicated than that. But history gives us countless examples of what happens when groups of people are viewed as less intelligent, less trustworthy, less capable, or less deserving than others. When those beliefs become normalized, harmful treatment becomes easier to justify and easier to ignore.

What interests me as a trauma therapist is not simply the behavior. It is the belief system underneath the behavior.

As a Christian, I find myself returning to a truth that appears in the very first chapter of Scripture. Human beings are created in the image of God. Before we accomplish anything, before we earn anything, before we belong to a particular nation, race, political party, social class, or denomination, we bear God’s image.

That truth has profound implications.

If every person bears the image of God, then human dignity is not something that can be granted by culture or withheld by those in power. It is not reserved for people who look like us, think like us, vote like us, worship like us, or agree with us. It belongs equally to every human being.

Violence becomes possible when we lose sight of that reality.

Trauma often develops in environments where people are not fully seen. Survivors frequently describe feeling invisible, dismissed, controlled, or unheard. They talk about being treated as though their thoughts, feelings, or experiences carried less weight than someone else’s.

In many ways, trauma is not only the experience of being harmed. It is often the experience of having one’s God-given dignity ignored, denied, or violated. Over time, those experiences shape how people understand themselves and the world around them.

A woman leaving an abusive relationship may struggle to believe that her needs matter. A child who grew up in a controlling home may have difficulty trusting their own judgment. A person who has repeatedly encountered prejudice may begin to anticipate rejection before it occurs. The circumstances are different, but the underlying injury often has something in common: the experience of being treated as less than fully human.

As Christians, this should concern us deeply.

Throughout Scripture, God consistently moves toward those who have been marginalized, oppressed, excluded, and overlooked. Jesus repeatedly crossed social, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries to restore dignity to people others had dismissed. He saw individuals where others saw categories. He saw image bearers where others saw outsiders.

His example challenges us to examine our own assumptions.

How do we view people who are different from us?

Whose voices do we instinctively trust?

Whose pain are we tempted to minimize?

Who have we quietly concluded matters less?

These are uncomfortable questions, but they are important ones.

Children are constantly learning from the environments around them. They notice who is respected and who is dismissed. They notice who gets to speak and who is expected to stay quiet. They notice who is protected and who is blamed when something goes wrong.

As followers of Christ, we have the opportunity to model something different.

We can create families, churches, workplaces, and communities where dignity is consistently affirmed. We can speak up when others are devalued. We can challenge systems and attitudes that diminish people. We can teach our children that every person they encounter bears the image of God.

The longer I do this work, the more I believe that violence grows wherever empathy shrinks. When people stop seeing one another as fully human, harmful behavior becomes easier to justify. When dignity becomes conditional, abuse becomes easier to tolerate.

The gospel calls us in the opposite direction. It calls us to see people as God sees them. It calls us to recognize the image of God in those who are easy to love and those who are difficult to understand. It calls us to remember that every person we encounter possesses inherent worth because they were created by the same God who created us.

That does not solve every problem. Human beings are far too complicated for simple solutions.

But I believe it is one of the places where both healing and prevention begin: in the decision to see every person as an image bearer whose dignity is worthy of protection, respect, and care.