“Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life–be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others…I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba’s child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused” (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out).

We all could do with a little more tenderness and compassion these days instead of self-righteous anger, condescension, name-calling, arrogance, and plenty of other -isms out there that divide rather than unite.

You can disagree with someone else without them becoming the enemy. You can have opposite opinions on a topic without the other automatically becoming evil or stupid.

It all boils down to remembering that we all bear the imago dei, the image of God, and are all created lovingly by Creator God. There’s no one for whom Jesus did not die. 

That’s not to say that you should never speak out against injustice and wrong in the world, but that there is a loving and compassionate way to do so that maintains the dignity and worth of all human beings.

At the end when we stand before Jesus, He will not ask if we won every argument or showed the other side how stupid and wrong they were. He will not ask if our side “won” and we were proven right.

He will ask what we did for the least of these and for those with no voice. He will ask if we loved others the way that He loves them and the way that He loved us when we were at our most unlovable.

So, try a little more tenderness and compassion.