The Second Coming, of Compassion

Midlife has a way of softening the edges. The things I used to see as black and white have blurred into watercolor, gray on gray with streaks of gold. The older I get, the more I notice how much of life refuses to stay inside the lines. TBH it never really did. Maybe this is what the

Re-Era really is; the season when certainty fades and compassion takes its place.

I used to think spiritual maturity meant standing firm in my beliefs.

Now I have come to understand, it’s somewhat of the opposite. And, if we are brave, we can REconsider what we have been indoctrinated with towards to actually widening our hearts and communities to heed the message of Jesus, himself. Maybe it’s about making space for the words, “Whatever you do for the least of my people, you do for me.”

We are all mosaics made of our experiences, cultural and family histories, genetics, geography, hopes, dreams, trauma and hurts.

The longer we live, the more we realize how fragile "certainty" really is. Somewhere in that realization, compassion begins to REbuild us, if you are brave enough.

Friends, I am not speaking of compassion as a feeling, but as a movement. As action. As a living faith that shows up in the real world, the way Matthew 25 describes compassion in motion. Because faith without movement is just theory, and theory never fed a hungry child, a desperate father or comforted a frightened mother.

Maybe self-love was never meant to be vanity at all. Maybe it’s compassion turned inward, the same commandment in reverse.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” only works if you know how to love yourself without shame. Otherwise it isn’t love.

That truth came rushing back when I REread Matthew 25, the story of the sheep and the goats. I used to hear it as a warning about who was in and who was out. (of the Kingdom of God)

Now I hear it as an invitation to compassion, a call to see others through the eyes of Jesus, instead of through distaste, superiority, or fear of what we don’t understand. (on all issues, not the ones we cherry pick to make points)

It turns out the story wasn’t about theology or politics It was about REcognition. About noticing the divine inside all of us, including, no, especially including those who are different from us. The ones who make us uncomfortable. The ones who live their lives in ways we cannot agree with. The ones whose lives we can’t easily relate to or explain.

It’s about seeing God reflected in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, and realizing that love was never meant to be limited to those who look or live like us.

Maybe it happens when our love for truth grows a little too proud.

We start to cling to our own revelations as if they’re proof we earned, instead of gifts we were given. When something changes your life, it’s natural to want others to feel that same light. But did Jesus ever try to convince anyone? His parables weren’t arguments. They were quiet invitations, stories that left space for wonder to do its work.

I forget that sometimes. When someone doesn’t see what I see, I mistake it for stubbornness instead of honoring their own divine timing.

That’s how moral superiority sneaks in. Not from malice, but from misplaced urgency, from trying to do God’s part instead of trusting His process.

Grace whispers that it was never my job to make anyone understand.

My work is simply to love them while they find their way, to let them return to truth in their own time. Because mercy only works when it flows both ways.

Maybe that’s why this passage hits harder in midlife.

Because by now, we’ve been all of those things.

We’ve been the stranger, the hungry one, the forgotten one.

And we’ve also been the one who walked right past.

I don’t think Jesus was giving us a checklist for sainthood.

I think he was handing us a map back to our humanity.

He was saying, don’t miss me while you’re busy sorting who belongs and who doesn’t.

If you really look, you’ll find Christ in the faces that unsettle you.

The tired mother searching for safety with a child on her hip.

The man sleeping on the sidewalk who still manages a smile when you meet his eye. The addict clawing toward one more day of sobriety.

The version of yourself you keep trying to hide from.

That’s where grace lives, beneath the labels and far beyond the headlines. That’s where Spicy Living begins, in the decision to reopen your heart instead of hardening it.

Because MidLife REinvention isn’t just about changing careers or finding new hobbies.

It’s about rREclaiming joy.

It’s aboutREleasing judgment.

It’s about REmembering who you were before you were handed a script and a role of you who are "supposed" to be.

It’s about expanding our hearts until it can hold more of humanity.

It’s about realizing that wisdom doesn’t make you certain. It makes you curious.

This is the quiet work of the RE-Era; to REbuild, to REdiscover, to REturn to love.

Maybe all the hard lessons and heartbreaks were meant to teach us how to reach down and offer a hand to someone else. Maybe that’s what Jesus was really saying... Don’t just believe in me. Be like me.

Become the love I’ve been trying to show you.

The older I get, the less I want to be right.

I just want to be kind.

Maybe that’s how the Re-Era begins, one softened, REawakened heart at a time.