Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

We were not made for the kind of antagonism that pervades our world. We were made in love, and for love, by a good, beautiful, and kind God.

One of the dangers is we expect the gifts of the Spirit to quickly do what only the fruit of the Spirit is meant to do slowly.

If the greatest commandment given by Jesus is rooted in love, the greatest sin—and perhaps all sin—must in some way be the rejection of this command. This is what makes sin so pernicious. It orients us inward. It curves us in on ourselves, and in so doing, it uproots love, goodness, beauty, and kindness.

Love is the fulfillment of faith; sin is the negation of it.

But the greatest of these is love” (verse 13). If love is the greatest good, sin must be the antithesis of it. Sin is not just a violation of a law; it’s the disruption of love.

What if you could trace all the horribly concrete wounds and fractures of our culture, churches, families, and most intimate relationships to the disruption of love?

it is this increased standard of difficulty that Christ so memorably calls us to embrace.

A robust theology of sin helps us live beyond self-deception. A limited theology of sin often results in a false sense of spiritual maturity.

When spiritual vitality is measured by sin-avoidance, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are following Jesus faithfully.

Christianity is regarded as a hypocritical religion by the watching world. The world sees the scrupulosity around individual sin and personal piety without the corresponding commitment to love and justice.

How can one who has become locked into their own soul expect to cultivate a healthy relationship with the wider world?

his grace turns us inward for the sake of self-awareness, confession, and ultimately love.

to center the world on our comfort, security, fear, desire, and personal perspective.

Sin is destructive because it causes us to live self-seeking lives over and against others. It is never personal, never private.

I can live a so-called morally upright life and still be caught in sin, turning inward.

We are often envious about only the things that matter most to us. Jealousy reveals the idols of our hearts.

This sin—trying to make outward reality resemble our stunted, cramped inward one—has repeated through the ages.

sin is not just something we do but a power we are under,

we lose our credibility by refusing to name our sins.

We are more vulnerable and exposed than we think.

Powers and principalities are spiritual forces that become hostile, taking root in individuals, ideologies, and institutions, with the goal of deception, division, and depersonalization.

love must be grounded in reality, nurtured in unity, and protected through the compassionate valuing of a person’s worth and dignity.

their fallen state, the powers and principalities of the world are fueled by lies. It’s what sustains their presence in human institutions and societies. That failure to be true is also what separates us from love.

convincing us to orient our lives around certain values (often good values, at least in the beginning) until they dominate us to such a degree that we can achieve them only through deceit.

Another strategy of the fallen powers is to form us to see generic groups of people rather than individuals. If the powers can have us relate to (and even hate, mock, or dismiss) categories of people instead of individuals—whom we all must acknowledge possess unique stories, pains, and gifts—it makes it easier to forget the humanity of those different from or disagreeing with us. Depersonalization is an act of desacralization. When we depersonalize, we stop seeing individuals as sacred creations of God. We begin to see them as an “it.” When we are shaped to generalize unique, unrepeatable individuals, it makes it easier to keep them at arm’s length or treat them with hostile force.

The church, since its inception, has lived with a dual identity. It has done wonderful things: establishing hospitals, serving the poor, working to abolish slavery, and inspiring people to live into a transcendent reality. These efforts have been both the work of individuals and the work of institutions. But at the same time—sometimes even in the same actions—the church has led violent crusades, embraced racism, perpetuated abuse, and aligned herself in compromising manners with political powers severely damaging Christian witness. We must understand and acknowledge this reality or we run the risk of rationalizing or becoming blind to our own shortcomings or even sin. How, then, do we respond to all this? To begin, with awareness.

We were not made for bondage to any force besides the love of Christ.

The powers thrive when the emphasis of faith solely focuses on private sinful behavior and self-oriented spiritual practices. They love when Christians turn a blind eye to poverty, abuse, and war without engaging the larger forces at work.

One of the most important tactics for keeping injustice present is convincing the humans that racism or classism is strictly an individual feeling of superiority. Don’t let them focus on the institutional elements of it.

The peace Paul spoke of is not only the interior, spiritual, and psychological peace made possible through the Spirit, but the commitment to carry the good news of peace (wholeness, shalom) in a world of fragmentation.

Our faith is in the faithfulness of Jesus.

We resist the powers not just by leading people to individually renounce them but by announcing salvation that extends to the larger social, economic, and political spheres of life that imprison people.

You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.[13]

All through Jesus’s life, he was disarming the powers. Every time he compassionately placed his hand on a marginalized person, he was revolting against powerful, spiritual messaging that declared that some people in society were contaminated and unworthy of touch. Every time he welcomed a sinner as worthy of love and belonging, he was rebelling against the powers that neatly divide the world into “us” and “them” categories. Every time he showed solidarity with the poor, he was rising up against the powers of greed. Every time he loved a religious outsider, he was overthrowing the power of religiosity. Taking it further, when Jesus died on the cross, he didn’t die just to forgive us of our sins. He died to destroy the work of Satan and disarm the powers.

in the kingdom of God, the powers are not conquered by our mirroring them but by our resisting them. Jesus doesn’t resort to the tactics of the powers.

the evil powers of our day are not defeated by doing what they do. They are defeated through suffering love.

To say that Christ has disarmed the powers is not to naïvely suggest that we who are his followers are not often under their grip. But in Christ, we in fact are saved, are being saved, and will be saved from their dominion.

The world’s problems are ultimately solved not through our action but through Christ’s love. That’s where we place our hope: not in something we do, but in something God has already done. For now, the powers remain active, just as sin is a fragmenting reality for us all. Their mark can be seen on our lives and institutions. They are the spiritual forces responsible for much of the fracturing of our society. Consequently, you and I live as wounded people and as wounding people. Therefore, any treatment of the fractured world we see and feel must address the trauma we all carry. That’s our next stop on the journey as we consider how we, like Christ, can become good, beautiful, and kind.

Beyond the physical traumas our bodies experience, there are a myriad of mental traumas that wound us, and the common denominator is that they impede our call to love freely, generously.

Untended, the wounds we bear can lead to anxious reactivity and an inability to be truly “here,” which often results in diverse attempts at suppressing our pain through escapism or the creation of alternate interpretations that we choose to believe instead of our own. Yet to be marked by love calls for a difficult but liberating discovery: It’s in the compassionate confrontation of our wounds and trauma that we stumble toward wholeness, which, in turn, allows us to become agents of healing.

The more we know about another’s story, the harder it is to hate or harm that person—including ourselves.

Jesus might live in your heart, but Grandpa lives in your bones.

taking inventory of our trauma provides space for the Spirit to bring about healing….

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Robert Stolorow explained that developmental trauma occurs when “emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”

In a sin-stained, broken world, trauma will continue to be with us. But, by the grace of God, it does not have to consume us. It can be redeemed. That is, for all its strangeness, the good news of the gospel.

The way to loving well in a traumatized world requires a level of compassionate self-confrontation deep enough to face ourselves, which in turn enables us to relate differently toward others.

Shame turns us in on ourselves, closing us off to others. It’s impossible to be established in love when we are rooted in shame. Why? Because true love requires vulnerability.

Psychiatrist Curt Thompson highlighted the importance of parents making coherent sense of their stories. In his book Anatomy of the Soul, he wrote, “People who have made coherent sense of their own stories enable their children to attach [to them] securely…. In fact, of all the variables that influence the formation of a child’s attachment pattern, the single most robust factor is whether or not the parent has made sense of his or her own life.”[11]

whatever we cannot name reveals the insidious bondage we still exist in. Yet, through the love of God, we were made to live openly, at ease, and courageously, especially as we rehearse our woundedness. I’m talking not about flippancy but about a steadfast conviction that our wounds and trauma are not what identifies us. We are so much more.

While we still bear our scars, we must understand that God’s will is that we find peace, righteousness, and well-being in our bodies. Although we must wait for the fullness of this, we can choose to move toward this reality now in Jesus’s name.