"You may not control what happens to you,

but you always control how you rise. Strength is built in the comeback,

character in the choice, and legacy in how you lift others as you climb."

- Stephen Panus

I wrote the below words as part of a draft of a potential book I've been working on. Our world feels increasingly fractured, and yet the remedy has always been simple: the unshakable truth of Jesus’ call to love, to have mercy, and to exercise humility. In a time of intense noise, great distortion, and fear-based division, let us not forget that we are much more alike than different.

I feel compelled to share these words now, hoping that they can serve to provide clarity and guide us toward healing and uniting:

"The words of Jesus were never complicated. His truth was not entangled in politics, nor did his message need elaborate interpretation or deciphering. His words were simple and piercing: love your neighbor, forgive your enemy, show mercy, walk humbly, be kind. These truths were meant to liberate the human soul, to set us free from the chains of hate and fear, segregation and phobia.

Yet over the centuries, His words have been hijacked. Human institutions, cloaked in authority, have twisted them into weapons of control and division. What began as a gospel of love has too often been reinterpreted and reduced to rules, power structures, and dogmas more concerned with exclusion than inclusion, more intent on judgment than mercy.

In this distortion, hypocrisy thrives. We preach about love from pulpits but practice disdain in our streets. We quote Jesus on forgiveness but clutch grudges tighter than life itself. We extol His humility while elevating ego, status, and control. And in this misalignment, a schism is occurring across our culture. Instead of uniting us under the simplicity of His truth, religion too often becomes another dividing line, another battlefield where His name is invoked but His heart and truth are ignored.

The tragedy is not that His words have lost their power, they have not nor will they ever. The failure is that we have allowed human agendas to bury His truth beneath noise and ritual, obscuring their intellectual lucidity and purity. And so, the world grows more divided, removed even further from the truth that was always meant to heal us.

But His words still exist. If we dare to listen, they can be heard and seen. They whisper to us: Be kind. Love one another. Show mercy. No cathedral, no institution, no pulpit or politician can barricade us from that truth. It is eternal, and it waits for us, if we would only have the courage to return to it." - Stephen Panus

Photo credit: "Prince of Peace" painting by Akiane Kramari

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