Hardship can expose the distance between knowing a teaching in words and understanding it through life. This reflection explores how an understanding of life, offense, compassion, and spiritual discernment can change through difficult experience.
What is something Jesus taught that you thought you understood until living through a difficult experience helped you understand it differently?
The passage in Revelation that describes the saints as not loving their lives unto death. When I first read it, I thought I understood it because I did not love my own life at that time. I believed that was simply how life had always been and how it would remain.
Later, I understood that I was living through a trial. I had come to think life was unfair unless a person was willing to take advantage of others and make peace with that inside their own moral compass. Now I understand love and life with more discipline and maturity. Life is not unfair, and life is not located on earth.
When you say, “Life is not unfair and it’s also not on earth,” what does “life” mean to you now?
Our soul has life. Our bodies serve our soul, and the earth serves our bodies.
How has that understanding changed the way you live through hardship and treat other people?
I do not take things personally in the same way anymore. It is difficult to take something personally when I no longer see what is visible as all there is. That makes it easier to see through to the heart of an issue. What I once experienced only as hardship can then become something I understand.
Can you share a specific moment when seeing the heart of an issue helped you understand something you once would have taken personally?
Those moments happen regularly. I used to be offended often, and sometimes offense was the other person’s intent. Even when it is, I am not bothered in the same way because the heart of the issue becomes obvious without my having to force it. It is never truly about me.
In the most recent example, their judgment of me had been intensified by what I would describe as accumulated dark whispers outside their own clear reasoning. They perceived my side of the conversation through earlier wounds and made me the recipient of the vengeance they imagined toward others who had hurt them in similar conversations. Recognizing what they had locked inside broke my heart for them.
In that conversation, how did you respond to the person, and what happened next?
I reminded them who I am and who I am to them. I knew that, in that moment, I had effectively disappeared from their sight and become all those other people rolled into one. We continued without further issue.
What would you say to someone who wants to respond with that same compassion but still feels hurt in the moment?
From my experience of practicing silence and enduring what appears harmful while doing what is perfect, which I understand in Jesus’ teaching as continuing forward without letting the opposition control me, I learned something. When I first mastered doing well in the face of opposition, understanding became immediate. It moved faster than the conversation or event taking place.
The understanding revealed an entire story: the hurt inside the other person and what had happened for them to arrive at that moment. I came to see the hurt we receive as a gateway. If we care for the other person and that care is pure, the gateway leads us toward solutions.
If our hearts are not pure—if we despise the person, hold unforgiveness, or see in them someone we have not forgiven—we are more likely to match their aggression. If the pain is overwhelming, I would begin by finding ways to bless them. Understanding can follow.
How do you distinguish responding without retaliation from needing to speak up or step away when someone continues to cause harm?
I would say that when you care more about their eternal soul than anything else, you will know without a doubt the difference.
A note on compassion and safety
This reflection presents personal spiritual understanding and experience. Compassion and non-retaliation do not require remaining in immediate danger or accepting ongoing abuse. A person may seek safety, wise counsel, pastoral care, professional help, or emergency assistance while still refusing retaliation.
