Look around you.

Take a glance at your social media feeds. Watch the news.

Listen to people. Hear the strained weariness in their voices.

Look at their faces. See the tightness of their jaws and the furrow in their brows.

These are hard times.

Not that they are difficult (they surely are that too), but they are heavy and rigid and unyielding.

Hard times have a way of hardening people, even the most faithful people.

We rack up our battles and our disappointments and our damage, and the scar tissue gradually begins to accumulate on the lining of our hearts. Our soft spaces slowly solidify over time. The tender places of compassion and goodness that we had when we were younger compress and petrify until our very centers become stone.

Here hope gets squeezed out and joy dries up. Only bitterness and anger remain.

And when this happens our faith so easily becomes religion.

Religion is made to be hard.

Religion wants to mark the line between the inside and the outside, to delineate the blessed from the damned.

Religion builds its walls of creeds and confessions. It fortifies its perimeter with doctrine and dogma.

Religion defends its rightness and justifies its arrogance.

Religion fights wars and for that one needs weapons. It needs to fight and wounds and damage.

Yes, these are hard times but they don’t require an even harder people.

In days like these we need a faith that makes us softer.

This softness is not the opposite of conviction or the absence of principle. It is the quiet confidence that doesn’t require anyone else to mirror them.

This softness is the sacred, supple core of the peacemakers, the forgivers, the healers. It is the holy place that has always been where love does what love only love can do.

A faith that softens us will always make us more like Jesus.

His was a soft soul.

You can tell this because the afflicted sought him out. The broken reached out their hands to him. The wounded never recoiled from his embrace. People knew that their pain was safe in his presence.

From the hard places and the hard people, he was a refuge. His softness was sanctuary to which they ran.

I wonder if this is still what the people of Jesus are known for. I wonder if it’s what I’m known for. I’ve felt the growing coldness in the center of my chest in these days, so sure that it’s been conviction and principle, certain it has been fierce faith—but maybe I’ve let these times harden me too.

The world has had enough of hard, religious people claiming that they come in love while throwing stones; the preachers and the Evangelists and the enthusiastic judges who see their inflexibility as virtue, their intolerance as noble, their abrasiveness as righteous.

The Church as a building will be perfectly fine being hard. It will welcome the rigidity and solidity that religion promises.

But the Church as a living, breathing, feeling body, will need to hold on to its flesh so that it can be the gentle, loving response to all the hardness around it.

Hurting people never fear faithful people whose hearts are still soft. They will always fear hard religious people—because those are often the ones who hurt them.

I am trying not to respond to religion with more religion.

I am trying to hold onto to the pliable heart of Jesus in the middle of very difficult days.

I am doing my best to not become stone in hard times.

I am praying for a faith that will make me softer.

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