The longer I’m a Christian, the less sin looks like rule-breaking and the more it looks like wounded people destroying what they love.
I grew up around criminals, addicts, predators, liars, men swollen with rage, women hollowed out by survival. Pedophiles. Cowards. Violence sitting at the dinner table like another relative passing the potatoes. Everybody bleeding. Everybody pretending not to smell the blood.
When you grow up inside that kind of world, evil first appears cartoonish. You think bad people must wake up every morning rubbing their hands together like movie villains. But life is uglier and sadder than that.
Most people are not demons.
They are fractured.
Starving.
Ashamed.
Half-feral from wounds they never dragged into the light.
And so they destroy the very thing they’re begging for.
A man wants love but cannot stop controlling. A mother wants closeness but poisons every room she enters. A family wants peace while feeding itself secrets like communion. Whole generations passing pain mouth to mouth.
That’s the part nobody tells you about sin.
It reproduces itself.
It crawls through bloodlines. Through silence. Through humiliation. Through the little unloved corners of a person that slowly turn septic in the dark.
The older I get, the less interested I am in polished morality performances. I have seen too much rot hiding beneath clean collars and church smiles. Sin is rarely just rebellion. More often it is self-destruction wearing aftershave.
None of this excuses evil. Some acts are monstrous. Some people should spend the rest of their lives far away from children and innocent people.
But Christianity has ruined my ability to see human beings in flat categories.
Because Christ keeps insisting on this unbearable truth: the drunk, the abuser, the narcissist, the coward, the addict, the religious fraud, the prostitute, the bitter mother, the violent father, even the self-righteous Christian, are all standing in the same place eventually. Broken. Spiritually hemorrhaging. Begging God for a kind of surgery deep enough to reach the root.
And maybe that is what salvation actually is.
Not God teaching good people to become better.
But God teaching wounded people how to stop destroying themselves and everyone they love.
Because people rarely destroy their lives over things they hate.
Usually they destroy themselves chasing things they love too much.
B🤍
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