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

by Rich Villodas

In his wounds, Jesus shows himself to be one who identifies—even in a resurrected state—with humanity.

our wounds don’t have the last word. In Jesus’s body, we simultaneously see broken humanity connected to but subjected to his glorious resurrected reality.

In God’s hands, our wounds become sources of healing, for ourselves and others. God wastes nothing, not even our deepest pain. Instead, the wounds that mark us are given a new narrative. No longer are we reduced to our worst memories. We now have access to imagine a new future. No longer are we subject to what happened. We now receive grace to show the world that something transformative happens when God’s presence is invited into our stories. No longer do our wounds have to hinder love. In the grace of the Crucified One, we are given the resources to have our love deepened.

The prayer that transforms the world is prayer that transforms us in Christ.

experiences are not the goal with contemplative prayer. Those who live for experiences will find themselves relating to God as a cosmic vending machine, banging on the glass when the spiritual item they want is stuck beyond their reach. Contemplative prayer, however, is allowing your soul to be kissed by God in ways that go beyond what we can feel. What is a mystic, then? Simply someone who takes the radically available presence of God seriously.

until we give ourselves consistently to this work to confront our own demons, we will project them back out into the world and fail to see that some demons in the world are reflections of ourselves.

As the Quaker Douglas Steere has said, “Stopping too soon is the commonest dead-end street in prayer.”[10] His statement should remind us that the point of this kind of prayer is not to measure the change we want to see but rather to meet with the God we do not see. It just so happens that meeting with God will bring about great change; we are just unaware of the depth of change within ourselves.

humility is not just doing a lowly task; it’s a life committed to the hard task of lowering one’s defenses.

The fractured relationships we experience emerge out of our inability (or our refusal) to lower our defenses. Instead of seeing companions, we see competitors. People who disagree with us are viewed as threats to be eliminated. The walls we build are for one reason: to protect the false self.

Every time our false self is threatened, it reveals the fragility we carry. Humility is the antidote to soul fragility.

The way of humility essentially says, I don’t take myself too seriously; I have no need to project myself as something I’m not; I don’t need to be in control; I’m open to things that are beyond my experience or understanding.

Humility says, I know I have blind spots. Can you help me see?

we don’t like correction because it painfully reminds us of our failures and shortcomings. When we are corrected, our insecurities often come to the surface. To be corrected exposes our gaps and reveals our weaknesses. Our fundamental identity is put into question. As a result, we resist correction. The resistance can be fueled by pride, for sure, but much more so by shame.

The opposite of differentiation is reactivity, emotionality, and automatic functioning.

Yes, it is true that Jesus reserved some of his harshest criticism for the religious establishment for the ways they disregarded the poor, but even in his words of rebuke, he wept over a city that had not discerned the presence of God among them. We need his example to navigate the most difficult, polarizing issues of our day.

Self-regulation is not suppression. It’s not ignoring the very real emotional sensations coursing through our minds and bodies. It’s not spiritualizing. It’s the training of our minds and souls to resist the force of our impulses.

The work of cultivating calm presence begins as we wrestle with our own faulty thinking before we come face-to-face with someone in conflict. As a matter of fact, our ability to name the messages that heap shame on us is what positions us to remain close to others.

To speak respectfully is to honor one another. It’s to regard people as made in the image of God, deserving of non-condescending speech. Healthy speech is also honest. It’s not marked by spin, exaggeration, or minimizing. It’s truthful. It’s also to be clear. Healthy speech calls for interior and exterior clarity. And finally, healthy speech is timely—that is, it makes adequate, appropriate room for meaningful engagement.

Having a life marked by goodness, beauty, and kindness means we must face conflict and deal with it maturely.

The Bible is not a collection of stories of holy people who always love God and neighbor well; it’s a collection of severely broken, sinful people poorly navigating through life and consistently encountering a gracious God. When seen in this light, the Bible is good news for all of us.

In his book The Soul of Shame, Curt Thompson named the felt sense of shame and a corresponding internal message. Why does shame imprison us? Thompson noted that one reason is we internalize this script: “I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment.”[4]

I’ve had to repeat the opposite of this quote from time to time when entering a conversation in which I needed to address conflict: “I do have what it takes to tolerate this moment.”

When we are attempting to explore hurt, disappointment, or frustration, we don’t need an expansive trove of multisyllabic words; we need plainness of heart and clarity of speech.

Listening well is a refusal to allow self-righteousness to distort our interactions.

Defensiveness is often a subtle but blatant rejection of our humanity and, consequently, a rejection of God’s grace.

The table is not a reward for good behavior but a gift for the broken.

The question is not whether forgiveness is the right thing to do. The question is, In a racialized, politicized, and polarized society, can we hold together all the layers of pain while pronouncing grace over another?

Forgiveness is scandalous in our culture because we are overtly and covertly shaped by violence, retribution, and exclusionism. Instead of marking us by this way of being, forgiveness extends the gift of unmerited grace.

To forgive is to cancel the debt owed, to forego retribution, to say no to revenge. It’s the clear recognition of wrongdoing but the refusal to continue the cycle of offense. In the act of forgiveness, we imagine God in glorious ways, for he is one who delights in forgiveness.

Forgiveness is inner freedom from allowing the wound inflicted from another to be the primary and permanent point of reference from which we relate to the world.

Unforgiveness doesn’t merely inform the way we relate to the person responsible for the offense; it metastasizes to the point where other relationships are filtered through previous experiences.

true freedom is not just in receiving forgiveness but in allowing that grace to flow through us to others.

Our choices have very real consequences, and an act of divine forgiveness doesn’t necessarily remove the impact of our misguided ways. Similarly, forgiveness doesn’t mean that justice is rendered obsolete. Forgiveness and justice are not mutually exclusive.

Forgiveness is not medicine that heals past pain and inoculates us from feeling new waves of it.

Forgiveness is often a painful, redemptive act, but when done in haste and without careful reflection, it can intensify the rift and resentment we have toward others. Ironically, this kind of forgiveness prolongs the pain because we must concurrently carry the wound and the unprocessed bestowal of grace. Mindless, reactionary acts of forgiveness do not lead to the freedom we long for.

God is not to be loved “first”; he is to be loved in and through all. The biblical idea is that we love God by means of all our loves, including those that in fact seem quite down to earth. In fact, to summarize and synthesize many of Christ’s most essential teachings, to love our neighbor is to give what’s due to God.

Justice is not something we do after we have “loved God.” Justice is one of the primary ways to love him. It is essential, not an extra.

The scandal of Christianity is that we love and encounter God through people, especially those on the margins of society, the edges of our awareness, or the “wrong” side of a conflict (an “enemy”).

Any talk of Christian love that does not faithfully wrestle with the application of it in larger, public matters is a betrayal of faith. To speak meaningfully of love is to care about justice. Professor Cornel West has said it best: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

God’s love is not neutral. God takes sides. Yes, it is true that God loves everyone. It is also true that he has a track record of paying particular attention to those whom society ostracizes or overlooks. Like a parent who tenderly comes to the aid of a sick child in a home with healthy siblings, God comes to the aid of those mistreated. He prioritizes their care and well-being. The God revealed in the story of Israel cannot stomach injustice.

Justice is the right ordering of relationships. It’s an act of organizing life through mutuality and not coercion, humility and not dominance, generosity and not greed, compassion rather than indifference.

biblical justice is relational but is to be carried out systematically.

justice is not simply demonstrated through individual acts of mercy. It’s carried out by addressing the way power is misused. Mercy means bandaging up people bloodied in life. Justice refers to systemically stopping those who are bloodying up people in the first place, and creating an environment for everyone’s flourishing.

Justice must move beyond emotional catharsis toward a commitment to action in some capacity. Outrage is a great brand builder but a poor justice maker.

At the end of it all, Jesus will not say, “Well done, good and successful servant” or “Well done, good and influential servant” or “Well done, good and high-capacity servant,” but rather, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

Justice in the way of Jesus takes the time to look at people, dignifying them with our attention.

Christian justice is about ordering relationships to be marked by love expressed in individual, interpersonal, and institutional environments.

American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said, “The task of the church is to serve as the best example of what God can do with human community.”[11]

To have a good, beautiful, and kind life—one formed by love—requires us to extend our faith beyond the borders of our private emotional and spiritual concerns. We are called into a larger story, one characterized by participation in God’s kingdom. It’s the kind of participation that drives out passivity.