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My heart hurts.

The news is covered in tragic tales of loss.  Fathers and husbands, sons and nephews.  All over the web, the newspapers, social media. While there is mourning, there is even more judgment.  Hate.  Ignorance.  People “choosing sides” in what they post and comment on.

The news media digs up back stories as if petty theft justifies a murder.  And I can’t help but wonder if it were me, just which “me” would be portrayed.

The 20 year old ace student who drank and worked a lot.

The “lost” and underemployed 23 year old, who grappled with the way the world worked.

The pregnant woman, on top of things with her white collar job and hunger for God.

The stay at home 30 year old mother, the financial wreck and seemingly unstable woman who cries at church and sometimes feels overwhelmed with her three year and ten month old who need her.

All of us have complicated identities.

All of us, every one, are this hodgepodge mess of success and defeat, sin and grace.  And we’re all either worthy of death or worthy of redemption.  And while the news tries to piece together stories of victim’s pasts for some kind of seamless judgment as sinner or saint, our God says we can be both.

We stand in front of Him, sin-stained and unworthy.  Repugnant before the King of Kings.  But He reaches down to cover us.  He wraps His arms around us as the prodigals, and clothes us in “garments of salvation and (arrays us) in a robe of His righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10B NIV)

We become “His children, (and) we are His heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory”  (Romans 8:17A NLT) when we choose Him to stand in the gap for our insufficiency.

We live in this evil ridden world where problems aren’t as simple as the Confederate flag or lack of education, financial inequality or gun ownership.  It’s complicated.  We’re born into a fallen world where the inheritance is sin.

Sin begets sin begets sin begets sin.

In Matthew 6, Jesus points out that if you’ve ever been angry at your neighbor, you’re guilty of murder.  If you’ve looked at a woman with lust, you’re guilty of adultery.  With generations of sin introduced to the habitat of sin, we can’t help but be very lost, very hurting and broken sinners.

The world is way more complicated.

One of the greatest successes of Satan is the belief in “End Times” that bring judgment for all sinners and despair for all believers.

When we vilify our neighbor, and simplify and dismiss the world as headed toward the proverbial “hell in a hand basket,” then we’re not concerned with sharing the Love of Christ.  We no longer have compassion for our fellow man, or hurt at the suffering of the loss of unity between God and people, and people with one another.  In fact, we step away from the Heart of God completely, and begin to think that there are those not worth saving.

Christ came with the clean slate for all who dare to call upon His Name to be saved (Romans 10:13 NIV), “for it is by grace (we) have been saved.” (Ephesians 2:8A NIV).

The person of Jesus reserved His greatest judgment for those holding God as untouchable to those most broken and hurting, and held great compassion for those who have yet to know the Love of God.

As believers, our sin and brokenness are just as despicable, but miraculously we are covered in grace, and our stories need only to be His.  We can not stand in judgment over the lost, feigning to know the complete hearts of men, but rather, ought mourn over the loss of Life.

This is when we are in the Heart of God.