"But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all to fall on Him." — Isaiah 53:6

This is the Good Friday reading, and it stopped me this year in a way it hasn't before. Not the suffering part — we talk about the suffering plenty. It was the phrase of us all.

Not just my sin. Not just the sin of the people I love, or the people I find easy to extend grace to. All. Including the people I don't like. Including the people I might, God forgive me, hate. Every one of them made blameless by the same act that covers me. So how can I stand in judgment of them any more than I stand in judgment of myself?

Now, that doesn't mean I ignore wrong. I can analyze my own actions and determine them good or bad and handle myself accordingly. And that should be my response to others I find distasteful — not ignoring the wrong, but taking the emotion of hatred out of it.

Easy to say. Harder to live.

The Public Figure Problem

Here's where it gets practical and uncomfortable. There is a public figure — I won't name them, you can probably guess — who in my estimation has some pretty significant character flaws that are causing a lot of damage. And I want to be clear about what bothers me: I can accept a stated policy goal even when it's contrary to my leaning. I can't honestly accept the concept of a democratic republic without being able to do that. Disagreement is the system working as designed.

What I can't accept is the execution — the arrogance, the lack of respect for those who dissent. When a leader treats dissent as disloyalty rather than as a legitimate part of the process, that's not a policy position I can agree or disagree with. That's a character issue that corrodes the very mechanism that makes self-governance work.

So I oppose it. And I try to oppose it analytically, theologically, through the lens of the incarnation. But I wouldn't be human if it wasn't hard. And here's the part I need to be honest about.

The Schadenfreude Problem

When things fall apart — predictably — I find some satisfaction in it. I feel badly for the damage it causes, but it also feels good to receive confirmation that I was right. And I know that's not the correct posture.

It's not just generic pleasure in someone else's misfortune. It's the vindication of being right. It feeds the ego in a way that feels almost righteous because it's attached to a correct analysis. I saw this coming, I said it would happen, and it did. That feels like wisdom confirmed. But the satisfaction is coming at the cost of real people being harmed, and taking pleasure in that — even indirectly — means I have a stake in things getting worse. Not consciously, not willingly, but the incentive is there. If they suddenly course-corrected and things improved, would part of me be disappointed? If the answer is even a little bit yes, that's the thing to pay attention to.

Here's the line that convicted me in my reflection this morning: Christ didn't come to be proven right about human brokenness. He came to heal it. The prophets who predicted judgment weren't celebrating when it arrived — Jeremiah wept over the very destruction he foretold. That's the posture difference. You can be right about what's coming and still grieve when it arrives.

What Hope Looks Like

So what's the right hope for someone like this? Is it possible they turn their life around? Yes. But not in the evangelical project sense where everything is shiny and new and like Scrooge they suddenly make everything right. That's a dangerous measure of naivete.

Someone following Christ is still broken, still sinful, still bound in flesh that tugs hard at doing the wrong thing. The right hope isn't a dramatic public conversion. It's that this person, in their brokenness, finds Christ — not in the evangelical sense, but in the incarnational sense — who meets them despite their brokenness. And we may never know it happened. That "we may never know it" matters, because it takes my ego completely out of the equation.

This points to something the church gets dangerously wrong: the idea that our measure of who is in and who is out with God is the one who looks clean versus unclean. Jesus spent his entire ministry dismantling that framework. The lepers, the bleeding woman, the tax collectors — not because they were secretly clean, but because the clean/unclean binary was never the point.

"When Were You Saved?"

This reminds me of something from years ago. Back when Danielle and I were steeped in the evangelical project in the late 90s, we were applying for our kids to attend the local Christian private school. There was an interview — as one might expect — where we met with some folks from the school. The only thing I remember about that conversation is the moment they asked: When were you converted? When were you saved?

It is documented that when I was about six or so I kneeled at my bed with my Dad and asked Jesus to come into my heart — the old tropey conversion moment. But I knew that wasn't it. I was met by Christ later in life as a broken person at my end and my limits. And I couldn't point to a specific date.

This seemed to unnerve the interviewers. It was surprising how much they pressed, how hard they tried to cajole me into giving them a date. They were convinced that conversion happens in a moment, that we are changed in an instant. But scripture is pretty clear that completion doesn't happen until a much later boundary event far beyond where we are now. Newbigin understood this — the full transformation of what God is doing in a person isn't something that resolves within this life in any tidy way. We live in the already and the not yet. Demanding a conversion date is collapsing an eschatological process into a biographical data point.

They wanted a birth certificate. What I had was a life.

Back to Good Friday

The six-year-old at the bedside with his dad wasn't nothing. But the real encounter was rougher, less presentable, and ongoing. That's not a failure of faith. And it connects all the way back to where I started this morning with Isaiah.

If conversion is a process rather than a moment, and if the resurrection is the boundary event that finally completes it, then my posture toward everyone — including that public figure whose arrogance makes my blood pressure rise — has to account for the fact that God isn't finished yet. With them or with me.

The incarnation means God enters the brokenness as it is, not after it's been cleaned up for presentation. The resurrection means that brokenness isn't the final word. And Good Friday is the day we sit with the cost of bridging the distance between the two.

So I'll keep trying. I'll keep opposing what I believe needs to be opposed, and I'll keep catching myself when the satisfaction of being right starts to taste better than it should. I'll try to grieve the damage instead of collecting it as evidence. And I'll hope — quietly, without needing to see the results — that the same grace that met me at my limits is at work in places I can't see.

That's all any of us can do from this side of the resurrection.