Letters to the American Church
To the beloved of Christ in the land of abundance and affliction, grace, mercy, and clarity to you in the name of Jesus, who was moved with compassion and wept over what the world deemed unworthy of tears.
I write to you with the weight of a question:
Have we forgotten how to feel?
Not how to feel offended.
Not how to feel angry.
But how to feel compassion.
We live in a society that discards the weak, mocks the vulnerable, and punishes the poor. And too often, the church has followed suit, not with cruelty in its hands, but with apathy in its heart.
Let us remember what moved Jesus.
He did not rush past the bleeding woman.
He did not avoid the cries of the blind.
He did not silence the leper or cross the road to preserve purity.
He stopped. He listened. He touched. He healed.
Mercy was not His strategy. It was His nature.
And it must become ours.
To be merciful is to see the suffering that others ignore.
It is to sit with pain that cannot be fixed.
It is to believe that no human life is disposable.
It is to say, “Your distress is not a disruption to my faith; it is where my faith begins.”
This is not softness. It is strength.
It is not sentimentality. It is sanctification.
Jesus did not bless the powerful, the efficient, or the polished.
He said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”
Mercy is not a loophole in God’s justice; it is the heart of it.
So I ask again, Church:
- When did we learn to explain away the tears of the traumatized?
- When did we become more fluent in judgment than in gentleness?
- When did we decide that suffering people were a political problem instead of sacred neighbors?
The Spirit of Christ is not found in cold calculation but in compassionate proximity.
We cannot call ourselves followers of Jesus if we do not bend toward the broken.
We cannot be His body if we do not carry His heart.
And His heart still beats for the hungry child, the grieving mother, the anxious mind, the wounded soul.
Mercy is not weakness; it is our witness.
Beloved, this is not a guilt trip. It is a gospel invitation. You are loved by the One who bore your wounds in His body. And He calls you not to save the world, but not to look away. To love those the world forgets. To see dignity where others see inconvenience. To bless what others curse.
Mercy will always look foolish to those addicted to power.
But it will look like Christ to those longing for a Savior.
So may we feel again.
May we move toward pain, not away from it.
May we become, once more, a people of mercy.
For that is the way of Jesus.
Grace and peace to you from the Compassionate Christ,
Bruce