Some Thoughts on Grace, Boundaries, and Biblical Kindness

There is a kind of niceness that many of us learn almost without realizing we’re learning it, especially if we’ve spent much of our lives in church. We smile and welcome people. We try to give others the benefit of the doubt. We don’t want to embarrass anyone or make a scene. We try to be gracious when someone gets something wrong, to forgive when we have been hurt, to leave room for second chances.

And there is something beautiful in much of that. I don’t think I would want us to become less gracious, less hospitable, or less willing to believe that people can grow and change.

I have been thinking lately, though, about whether kindness and niceness are always quite the same thing. Maybe part of the difficulty is that, from the outside, they can look remarkably similar. Both can be gentle. Both can sound gracious. Both can make room for another person. And perhaps most of the time there isn’t much reason to pull them apart.

It is when something becomes difficult that I think the difference begins to matter. When telling the truth might embarrass someone. When a boundary will disappoint someone. When asking another question feels uncomfortably close to being suspicious. When taking a concern seriously might disrupt a relationship or a community that we very much want to keep peaceful.

Those are the moments that have me wondering whether what feels kind is sometimes really our desire to keep things comfortable, and whether actual kindness might occasionally ask something more difficult of us, not because kindness is less gentle, but because perhaps it is concerned with something deeper than keeping the moment pleasant.

“Nice” isn’t really a word Scripture gives us, although many of the things we associate with niceness certainly are. Gentleness matters. Courtesy matters. Being careful with another person’s dignity matters. There is something deeply Christian about resisting the impulse to assume the worst about someone, and something beautiful about being a person who makes room for grace.

I wonder, though, if niceness can become complicated when those good instincts meet our own discomfort.

Most of us don’t enjoy being the person who raises a concern or asks the awkward question. We don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or embarrass them unnecessarily. We don’t want to appear judgmental or suspicious. We know how damaging a careless accusation can be, and so there may be very good reasons for us to move slowly and thoughtfully when something doesn’t feel quite right.

And in churches, perhaps there is another layer to this. We care deeply about forgiveness and reconciliation. We believe in second chances. We believe people are more than the worst thing they have ever done. We want our communities to be places where grace is actually practiced rather than merely preached. I don’t want to lose any of that.

I do wonder what happens, though, when our desire to preserve those things becomes tangled up with our desire to avoid an uncomfortable moment. Maybe we explain away something that gave us pause because we aren’t yet sure what it means. Maybe we hesitate to establish a boundary because the boundary feels harsher than we intend it to be. Maybe we offer another chance because that feels more gracious than asking whether accountability might actually be the more loving response.

None of those choices necessarily comes from indifference. Quite the opposite. They may come from compassion, humility, or a sincere desire not to cause unnecessary harm.

But I keep coming back to the question of who carries the cost of our uncertainty. If protecting one person’s feelings means another person’s safety receives less attention, or if keeping a situation comfortable means someone more vulnerable is quietly asked to carry more risk, then perhaps we have reached the place where niceness and kindness begin to part company.

When I started thinking about that difference, I found myself going back to the places where Scripture actually uses the word kindness. I suppose I expected to find something mostly tender there, and tenderness is certainly present, but the more I sat with those passages, the more I began to wonder if our biblical understanding of kindness is considerably larger than simply being pleasant to one another.

Kindness, of course, appears among the fruit of the Spirit:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” – Galatians 5:22–23

I’ve read that passage more times than I could count and, truthfully, have it memorized, but lately I’ve been lingering over the fact that kindness and goodness sit right there beside one another.

I don’t know that Paul intended us to make too much of their placement in the list, but it has made me curious about the relationship between them. Kindness, at least as Scripture describes it, seems to be about more than creating a pleasant experience for another person. There is something in it that is oriented toward their good.

Romans 2:4 has made me think about this even more:

“God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.” – Romans 2:4

There is something almost surprising about seeing kindness and repentance in the same sentence.

I think I have sometimes imagined kindness primarily as the thing that makes another person feel safe from discomfort. And yet Paul describes the kindness of God as something that can lead us toward the uncomfortable work of seeing ourselves truthfully and changing direction. That doesn’t sound harsh to me. But neither does it sound particularly concerned with preserving our comfort.

I’m curious whether that gives us another way of thinking about kindness. Maybe kindness isn’t measured entirely by how an interaction feels in the moment, but also by what we are seeking for the other person through it. And if what we are seeking is genuinely their good, wholeness, growth, restoration, and ability to live truthfully and well, then I wonder whether kindness sometimes has to make room for things we don’t ordinarily associate with being nice.

A difficult conversation, perhaps. A question that needs to be asked. A boundary that allows everyone involved to be cared for more honestly. Even, at times, a no.

I am increasingly persuaded that none of those things necessarily sits in opposition to kindness. Perhaps the question is less whether something feels nice in the moment and more whether we are willing to remain gentle and loving while seeking what is genuinely good.

I think this is part of what draws me back to the way Jesus moved through the world.

There is so much tenderness in the Gospel accounts. Jesus welcomed children when the adults around him seemed to regard them as an interruption. He touched people others were unwilling to touch. He noticed people who had become almost invisible to everyone else. He shared tables with people whose presence at the table made respectable people uncomfortable.

Again and again, he seems particularly attentive to the person with less power in the room: the person who was sick, shamed, excluded, dismissed, or simply easy to overlook.

There is a gentleness in Jesus that I don’t ever want us to lose when we talk about boundaries or accountability or safety. I worry sometimes that, in trying to correct an overly permissive understanding of grace, we can swing too far in the other direction and begin to imagine strength as hardness. I don’t see that in Jesus, but I don’t see niceness in the way we often mean it, either.

The same Jesus who could be extraordinarily tender with someone who was hurting could also be remarkably direct when someone’s actions, use of power, or understanding needed to be confronted. He challenged religious leaders. He named hypocrisy when he encountered it. He overturned tables in the temple. He asked questions that must have made the people answering them uncomfortable. And there were times when he allowed people to be disappointed in him, angry with him, or even to walk away from him without changing what he had said simply to restore the comfort of the interaction.

I’ve been sitting with that combination: tenderness without avoidance, gentleness without the need to make every encounter comfortable, love that could move toward the person who had been pushed to the edges while also being willing to disrupt the people and systems doing the pushing. Maybe there is something there for those of us trying to understand what kindness looks like when another person’s well-being is at stake.

I don’t think the life of Jesus gives us an easy formula for knowing exactly when to speak, when to wait, when to confront, or when to draw a boundary. If anything, his interactions seem far more attentive and particular than that, but they do make me wonder whether we have sometimes attached kindness to comfort more tightly than Jesus did, and whether following him might invite us to hold tenderness and courage together rather than assuming we have to choose between them.

This is where my thoughts about kindness have begun to intersect with some of the questions I spend a great deal of time thinking about: questions of safety, vulnerability, and what it means to care well for people within a church community.

Churches are, and should be, places shaped by grace. We believe in forgiveness and redemption. We practice hospitality. We make room for people who are still becoming who God created them to be, which, of course, is all of us. We believe broken things can be restored and that no person’s story has to end at the worst thing they have done. I treasure those things about the church, and maybe because we treasure them so deeply, we have to think carefully about what we are asking those words to mean.

Does grace always require access? Does forgiveness mean that a boundary is no longer necessary? Does believing the best about someone mean setting aside something we have observed that concerns us? Does hospitality require every person to be welcomed into every space, regardless of who else occupies that space or what vulnerabilities may be present there?

I don’t think those questions always have simple answers. People are complicated, situations are rarely as clear from the inside as they appear in retrospect, and I’m wary of any approach to safety that teaches us to regard one another primarily with suspicion, but I’m equally wary of what can happen when our discomfort with suspicion keeps us from paying attention.

There is a cost somewhere when we decide not to ask the difficult question or establish the uncomfortable boundary. Sometimes that decision is entirely appropriate; not every concern is evidence of danger, and wisdom includes resisting the temptation to turn uncertainty into accusation. Still, I find myself wondering who carries the uncertainty while we are deciding.

If I choose not to have an uncomfortable conversation because I don’t want someone to feel judged, does someone else quietly carry a little more risk? If something concerning happens and I decide it isn’t important enough to document, could I be removing one small piece of information that would have helped someone recognize a pattern later? If I hesitate to share a concern with the person responsible for responding to it because I don’t want to make too much of something, am I making that decision only for myself, or also for someone whose vulnerability I may not even be aware of yet?

Those questions don’t necessarily tell us what to do. I think, however, that they widen the circle of people we consider when we are deciding what kindness requires. And maybe that is where safety begins to look less like suspicion or rule-following and more like stewardship.

We are continually being entrusted with one another: with children, with people who are vulnerable, with information, with authority, with access, with moments when we notice something another person may not be able to see. I’m beginning to think that kindness may have something to say about how carefully we hold all of that.

Perhaps stewardship is part of why I keep returning to the way Scripture speaks about people who are vulnerable. The language is difficult to miss.

“Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”-  Psalm 82:3

There are many passages like this, both in the Old Testament and the New. Scripture seems continually to turn our attention toward the person whose voice may carry less weight, whose choices may be more limited, or whose well-being depends in some measure upon what someone with greater power chooses to do.

That same movement toward the person with less power is woven throughout the ministry of Jesus. Toward the child. Toward the sick person. Toward the person on the margins of the crowd. Toward the one carrying shame. Toward the person everyone else has somehow learned not to see. I think there is something important in that for the way we understand safety.

We often talk about protecting people as an organizational responsibility, and, of course, it is. Churches need policies and procedures. We need screening and training and reporting structures. We need to know what to do when something happens that concerns us, but before any of those things, there is something much older and deeper. There is the conviction, all the way back in Genesis, that the person standing in front of us bears the image of God.

I’ve been thinking about what changes when we begin there. Perhaps protection becomes more than preventing something bad from happening. Perhaps it becomes one of the ways we recognize the sacred worth of another person: the child who cannot yet advocate for herself, the person whose vulnerability makes it difficult to speak, the person telling us something we wish were not true, and even the person whose behavior has raised a concern, because boundaries and accountability do not somehow erase that person’s dignity either.

That makes the work more complicated, not less. It asks us to hold several things at once: to listen carefully without deciding too quickly what happened; to take concerning behavior seriously without turning concern into accusation; to record what we actually know rather than what we imagine; to follow the same safety practices when the person involved is someone we know and trust as we would if they were a stranger.

Sometimes it means allowing another responsible person into a situation we would rather handle quietly ourselves. Sometimes it means maintaining a boundary even when doing so feels awkward or relationally costly. And when reporting is required by law or by the responsibilities we have accepted, it means recognizing that keeping something “within the family” may not actually be ours to choose. None of this feels particularly tidy to me.

Maybe that is part of why I resist reducing safety to a set of rules. Rules matter enormously, but underneath them is something relational and theological: we have been entrusted with people who bear God’s image, and with differing measures of power and responsibility in relation to one another. Maybe kindness is partly what it looks like to carry that trust carefully.

I think this also asks us to reconsider something many of us have absorbed, perhaps without ever quite saying it aloud: the idea that boundaries and grace somehow exist on opposite sides of a Christian response.

I understand why we might feel that tension. Grace opens doors. Grace makes room. Grace refuses to reduce a person to what they have done. A boundary, by contrast, can feel like a closing and a restriction, a consequence, perhaps even a judgment. I’m not sure they are opposites.

I’ve been wondering whether a boundary can sometimes be one of the ways grace remains honest about what has happened and about what is needed now. We can recognize the dignity of a person while also recognizing that there may be places they should not have access to, at least for a time and perhaps permanently. We can resist shaming someone without pretending that accountability is unnecessary. We can genuinely hope and pray for someone’s restoration while acknowledging that restoration of the person and restoration to a particular role are not necessarily the same thing.

That distinction feels especially important in Christian communities because we believe so deeply in redemption. We believe people can change. I certainly do. We believe that no failure places someone beyond the reach of God’s grace. And yet I wonder if, in our eagerness to demonstrate that belief, we can sometimes ask other people to carry the uncertainty that comes with it.

If someone says they have changed, who should bear the risk while trust is being rebuilt? That question stays with me.

Perhaps it is possible to believe wholeheartedly in someone’s redemption without asking a child, a vulnerable adult, or another person with less power to become the evidence that the change is real. Perhaps trust can be rebuilt slowly and wisely, in places where the consequences of being wrong are not borne primarily by someone else. And perhaps forgiveness can coexist with that kind of wisdom too.

Forgiveness may change what I carry toward another person in my own heart. It may make reconciliation possible where reconciliation can safely occur. But it doesn’t erase history, and it doesn’t necessarily return a relationship to what it was before. Some things, once known, become part of what wisdom has to take into account.

The more I think about it, the less I see boundaries as a failure of grace. Sometimes they may simply be part of loving people truthfully and honoring the humanity of the person who needs the boundary while also honoring the humanity of the people the boundary is intended to protect.

All of this has made me wonder about the questions we ask ourselves when we find ourselves in one of these difficult moments. I suspect that, for many of us, one of the first questions, usually unspoken, is something like, How do I handle this without making things worse?

That isn’t necessarily a bad question. I don’t want to cause unnecessary harm. I don’t want to create conflict simply because I can. I don’t want to embarrass someone, overreact to incomplete information, or turn a concern into something larger than it actually is. Those instincts can reflect humility and care.

But I wonder if there is another question that needs to sit alongside them: What does love require of me here?

I like the question partly because it doesn’t provide an immediate answer. Sometimes love may require patience. Sometimes it may mean listening longer before deciding what we think. Sometimes it may mean extending grace or allowing someone another opportunity to get something right.

And sometimes, I think, the same question may lead us somewhere less comfortable. It may ask us to consider who is most vulnerable in the situation and whether their experience is receiving as much attention as the experience of the person we are reluctant to upset. It may ask us what we actually know, what we don’t know, and what we have a responsibility to find out. It may ask whether there is a boundary that would allow us to care for everyone involved while we are still discerning what comes next.

There may even be times when love asks us to tolerate another person’s disappointment with us. That is difficult for many of us, particularly in communities where relationships matter deeply. We want people to know that they are loved. We want them to experience grace. We want reconciliation whenever it is possible, but perhaps loving someone and keeping them comfortable are not always the same task.

I’m still thinking about that.

Because if kindness really is concerned with another person’s good, and if the people entrusted to us bear the image of God, then perhaps the question isn’t simply how to avoid causing discomfort.

Maybe we keep returning instead to the slower and more demanding question: What would it mean to love all of the people in this situation well?

I suppose I come back, in the end, to where I began.

I want our churches to be kind places. I want someone walking through the doors of a church to encounter warmth and hospitality. I want people who have made mistakes to discover that they are not forever defined by them. I want the person carrying shame to be treated with dignity, the person who is lonely to be noticed, the person who is hurting to encounter gentleness. I want us to be patient with one another, generous in the assumptions we make, willing to forgive, and slow to decide that we know everything there is to know about another person’s story.

I don’t want our growing attention to safety to cost us any of that. If anything, I wonder if it might invite us into a larger understanding of kindness. One that can remain gentle while asking a difficult question. One that can honor someone’s dignity while recognizing a risk. One that can hope deeply for restoration without requiring someone more vulnerable to carry the uncertainty of whether restoration has occurred. One that can welcome generously and still understand that there are times when access needs to be limited.

Perhaps kindness has more room in it than I once imagined. Room for warmth and boundaries. For forgiveness and accountability. For believing the best about people and paying attention to what is actually happening. For sitting quietly with someone who is hurting and for speaking when remaining quiet would leave someone else carrying a burden we were in a position to help bear.

And perhaps this is where I am landing, at least for now: not with a tidy distinction between nice people and kind people, but with a question I think is worth carrying.

When another person has been entrusted, even briefly, to my care, when I have information they don’t have, authority they don’t have, a voice they don’t have, or simply the ability to notice something they cannot yet name, what might kindness ask of me?

I don’t imagine the answer will always be the same. There will be times when kindness looks like welcoming someone in, and others when it means sitting quietly and listening. Sometimes it may ask us to wait, to resist reaching a conclusion before we know enough, or simply to stay close to someone who is hurting. At other times it may ask us to raise a question we would rather not raise or to draw a boundary we wish were unnecessary.

And maybe that is what I am beginning to understand differently.

Kindness does not have to become hard in order to protect, and it does not have to abandon grace in order to tell the truth. Perhaps it is spacious enough to hold welcome and wisdom, forgiveness and accountability, tenderness and boundaries, while continuing to regard every person involved as someone who bears the image of God.

I think that is the kind of kindness I want to keep learning.

Every time I come to the little book of Jude, I find myself lingering over the opening paragraphs. It is such a short letter that it can easily be read in just a few minutes, yet tucked inside those twenty-five verses is a sentence that has captured my attention for years.

“Although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share…”

I have often wondered what that first letter would have sounded like.

Jude had something on his heart that never quite made it onto the page. He wanted to write about the beauty of the gospel they held in common. I imagine him reflecting on grace, on the life they had found in Christ, on the shared hope that united believers from different places and different backgrounds. The opening feels almost as though we have walked into a conversation already in progress, only to discover that circumstances changed before he could finish the thought he originally intended.

Most of us know what it is like to begin moving in one direction only to discover that faithfulness requires another. There are conversations we planned to have that become conversations we never expected, and seasons that begin with celebration sometimes become seasons requiring courage. The path itself changes, and somewhere along the way we quietly change with it.

Jude does not seem resentful of the interruption. He simply acknowledges it and continues writing the letter that was needed rather than the one he had hoped to write. There is something quietly beautiful about that.

As the letter unfolds, Jude begins describing the subtle ways truth can become distorted. His concern is not simply with ideas floating somewhere in the abstract. He seems to understand that beliefs slowly shape affections, affections shape choices, and choices eventually shape communities. Rarely do people wake up one morning having abandoned the faith. More often, the drift is almost imperceptible, one small compromise at a time, one neglected truth at a time, one quiet accommodation after another.

Perhaps that is why Jude writes with such urgency, yet even in the urgency I do not hear panic. His words feel more like those of someone standing watch through the night while the people he loves are sleeping. He recognizes that there are things worth guarding, but he never gives the impression that the future of the faith rests on his own shoulders. There is a settled confidence beneath the warning that quietly shapes the tone of the entire letter.

As I continued reading this week, I noticed how often Jude redirects his readers away from everyone else and back toward their own walk with God.

“But you, dear friends…”

Those words appear almost like a deep breath in the middle of the letter, gently redirecting the reader’s attention away from everyone else and back toward the condition of their own soul.

The attention turns inward, not in a self-centered way, but in the way a gardener first tends the roots before worrying about the branches. Build yourselves up in your most holy faith. Pray. Keep yourselves in the love of God. Wait for the mercy of Christ.

There is something striking about the pace of these invitations. Jude isn’t describing techniques for winning debates or strategies for confronting error. He points his readers toward practices that have always unfolded slowly such as building faith, learning to pray, remaining in the love of God, and waiting for the mercy of Christ. They belong to the quiet work of spiritual formation, the kind of work that is often difficult to measure while it is happening but becomes unmistakable over the course of a lifetime.

I find myself wondering whether that is one of the reasons Jude has remained quietly relevant through every generation of the Church. Every age has had its own confusion, its own competing voices, and its own questions about what faithfulness requires. The circumstances change, but the invitation Jude offers feels remarkably familiar.

The more time I spend with this letter, the less it feels like a call to become experts in deception and the more it feels like an invitation to become deeply acquainted with Christ. The two pursuits may appear similar from a distance, but they shape us in very different ways. It is entirely possible to spend a lifetime studying counterfeit ideas without becoming deeply rooted in the life God offers. Jude seems far more interested in forming rooted disciples than producing accomplished critics.

Then, almost unexpectedly, tucked into the closing verses comes a simple instruction that feels as timely now as it must have been then:

“Be merciful to those who doubt.”

I cannot read those words without slowing down. They have lingered with me long after I finished the letter because they suggest that Jude understood something about the life of faith that can easily be overlooked. Discernment and mercy are not competing virtues. It is possible to care deeply about truth while also recognizing that questions often emerge from places of pain rather than rebellion.

Scripture is filled with people who wrestled honestly with God, and it is difficult to read their stories without noticing His remarkable patience. By the time Jude reaches his closing doxology, it feels entirely fitting that our attention has been drawn away from our own ability to remain steadfast and toward the God who is able to keep us. The letter begins by reminding believers that they are called, loved, and kept, and it closes with the assurance that the One who called them has never stopped holding them.

I have found myself returning to that thought often this week. There is a quiet steadiness in remembering that before we ever learned to hold on to God, He had already taken hold of us.

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.