Tag: Mercy

2026: Cultural Divides, Covenant, and Coffee

While 2025 has been marked by dramatically shifting plates under the surface of humanity, it has also been a time of growth, resilience, and gratitude.

Every morning, my husband prepares my coffee. It doesn’t matter what time I wake up, whether we share a similar schedule, or when he goes to bed after coming home late from rehearsal or a work engagement. Each morning, it is my privilege to walk into the kitchen, whose counter is fully lit with whatever sunlight the day is offering, a small gaggle of houseplants, my favorite coffee mug, and a French press cleaned and poised for boiling water.

This might seem like a little thing. But when you consider the aforementioned shifting plates, this morning routine is a respite filled with consistency and love. Little things are where life is lived.

This is the year I went back to teaching after enduring the most tumultuous four years of my life. The time between the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2024 taught me more about who I am than I had learned in the previous forty-something years. Anything good in me was a result of God’s grace, the beautiful kindness of those He placed in my life, and an enduring seed of the Word planted and watered over years of joy, hardship, victories, and defeats. In other words, I learned that I am far more limited than I once realized and far more equipped to handle the slings and arrows of this life than I deserve to be. As Paul reminds us, it is by grace that any of us go forward at all.

God’s love. God’s provision. The fruit of the Holy Spirit. These are life itself. And everything else in this life becomes mercy in His hands, through which we learn how to trust, laugh, cry, hold, and let go. This life is a journey in which we begin to recognize the absolute goodness of God and learn to look forward to the age to come.

So, teaching.

In 2025, I returned to teaching theatre and communication. I won’t write in detail about that topic here, because I’ve been writing about it quite a bit lately. What I will say is this: the best thing about teaching, for me, is that I get to sit with young people, find out who they are, how I can serve them, and where I can help them grow. Not only toward learning or career goals, but toward becoming the best version of themselves.

My entire teaching career has been one of planting seeds. I’ve never once had the same student twice. Because I’ve taught foundational courses like Introduction to Theatre, Public Speaking, Foundations of Communication, and Theatre History, I tend to see students in class during their earliest semesters and then see them in the halls for the next two to four years. It’s rare that I get to see the fruit of my own labor, but those moments do come. When they do, they are a gift. Either way, because my work has been to plant seeds, I’ve learned to quickly see how I can best serve whoever is in front of me and make the best of our time together. I count this a blessing, and a great deal of fun.

These past two years were also significant because this is when my husband and I went through the Book of Revelation in its entirety. It took us one year to read and study it, and another to sit with the implications of the revelation of Jesus for our lives yesterday, today, and forever. I have a feeling this is what I will be writing about for much of 2026. For now, I will simply say this: there is nothing more important in life than studying the Word of God, putting our faith in Him, obeying His Word, and trusting in the finished work of Christ on the cross, His resurrection, and the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Christ. These promises are not only future hopes. They are realities already unfolding now and finding their full completion in the age to come. Understanding that changed how I read the whole of Scripture.

God has always related to His people through covenant. From the beginning, He bound Himself to humanity with promises He alone would keep. He made a covenant with Abraham, promising blessing, land, and descendants, and declaring that through Abraham’s family all nations would be blessed. That covenant was carried forward through Isaac and Jacob and entrusted to the Jewish people, through whom God revealed His law, His faithfulness, and His name to the world. Jesus did not replace this covenant. He fulfilled it. In Him, the promises of God find their “yes.” Those who belong to Christ are grafted into this story, not as replacements, but as recipients of mercy, heirs by grace. The covenant God made with Israel is not erased by Christ, and the mercy extended to the nations does not diminish it. This covenant is not only about where history is going. It shapes how we live now, grounded in faithfulness rather than fear, held by a God who keeps His word.

This was the year I came to more fully understand the history of my own faith. Not fully, of course, but enough to give me context for God’s plan, His story of redemption, and His magnificent love. It was the year I stopped placing myself in the stories of the Bible and began to recognize, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that the entire Word of God is His story. It is filled with types and shadows of the Messiah, with good and evil, and with the absolute miracle that you or I get to be part of His story at all.

This was the year I learned, once and for all, that I need to be on His side. God is holy, and there is no possible way I can earn my way into His presence. Jesus came to this earth as the perfect sacrifice to a holy God, and it is only through Him that I can approach the Father. Through Christ, I am made clean. When God the Father sees me now, He sees His Son. There is nothing I could have done to earn His favor. Christ is the hope of glory.

This is the year I began to understand God as my Father. Because my earthly father disappeared when I was one year old, this has long been the aspect of God I struggled to trust. Not because I didn’t want to or didn’t believe He deserved my trust, but because I didn’t know how. God has been patient with me. I can now see that He has allowed certain storms in my life for a specific reason: so that I would humble myself and cry out, “Help me, Father.” There is a vulnerability only a daughter can feel and a kind of help and safety only a Father can provide. I trust my heavenly Father.

The world grew frightening this year, didn’t it? The political climate and our general sense of safety have been eroding. People are being killed for their faith. Riots fill the streets. Traditions are canceled because people are afraid to gather. Glowing screens in every household carry the noise of the world into our lives.

It is frightening.

But God.

There is a peace that surpasses all understanding, and it comes from one source alone. This year, by His will and for His glory, my resolution is to speak more about Him and to learn and teach about Him, His sacrifice on the cross, why it matters now, and why it is the only thing that will matter in the age to come.

So, 2026. Cultural divides, covenant, controversy, and coffee. What an adventure!

When Fairness Fails: What Forgiveness Teaches Us About Mercy

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Fairness is one of the first moral currencies we learn to spend. Long before we master mercy, we can cry That’s not fair! with the conviction of a tiny philosopher. The playground, after all, doubles as humanity’s first courtroom. Someone cuts in line for the slide, and suddenly the entire social order collapses. Justice must be restored, preferably before recess ends.

A child’s attempt to make sense of harm and hope in miniature is a first draft of moral reasoning. Fairness helps us name wrongs, negotiate rules, and build the fragile beginnings of trust. Civilization, in its earliest form, probably started over a disputed turn on the swings.

Still, fairness only works when everyone plays by the rules. When someone breaks them, what are we supposed to do? As children, we stomp off the field or call for backup—“Mom!” “Teacher!” “Ref!”—someone who can step in and make it right. Those are the early rituals of justice. But what happens when the whistle never blows, or the person who hurt us doesn’t make it right? Some wrongs go deeper than rules. They leave distance where there used to be closeness, even a shift in who we are. Fairness can fix the rules, but it can’t fix the relationship.

What follows are reflections on forgiveness: psychological, scientific, artistic, and theological. Not prescriptions, but explorations. Because fairness is the language of balance, while forgiveness speaks a dialect of grace that refuses translation.

Fairness keeps order; forgiveness keeps us human. While playground quarrels eventually fade, the instinct to keep score doesn’t. We carry it into adulthood, dressed in the language of boundaries, accountability, and justice. We say we’ve “moved on,” but the mind rarely gets the memo. It keeps a ledger even when the heart wants peace. Modern psychology has a name for this: rumination. The ancients simply called it remembering. Either way, forgiveness begins at the border between what we can’t forget and what we no longer wish to carry.

The Psychological View: The Mind and Its Loops

Modern psychology approaches forgiveness as a cognitive and emotional release rather than a strictly moral act. Dr. Everett Worthington, who has spent decades studying the subject, describes two distinct processes: decisional forgiveness, the conscious choice to stop pursuing revenge, and emotional forgiveness, the gradual softening of the heart’s automatic resistance. The two often unfold at different speeds, one emerging from thought and the other from time.

Neuroscience, the study of how the brain and nervous system shape thought, emotion, and behavior, adds another layer to the portrait. When anger is rehearsed, the brain’s limbic system activates as though the offense is still happening. The body does not easily distinguish between a memory and an event; to the nervous system, remembering pain and experiencing it are nearly the same. Each mental replay of the story re-ignites the stress response: the heart quickens, cortisol levels rise, muscles tighten, and breathing shortens. Over time, the brain begins to associate safety itself with vigilance. The mind learns that to stay alert is to stay alive.

Forgiveness, then, becomes a kind of neurological retraining. It is a deliberate effort to interrupt the loop that binds pain to identity. In clinical practice, therapists often describe forgiveness as the gradual release of hypervigilance rather than an act of forgetting. The goal is to remember without reliving. Through reframing, deep breathing, prayer, or contemplative awareness, the body learns that danger has passed. The nervous system, once tuned to defense, begins to trust again. The mind, which has carried the story of pain like a live wire, slowly cools, allowing space for calm to return.

Still, even within psychology, forgiveness remains mysterious because it straddles intellect and intuition. It can’t be forced, and it doesn’t appear on command. Readiness comes casually, more like the slow shifting of light across a room than a sudden change of weather. It arrives when the cost of carrying pain outweighs the fear of setting it down.

The Scientific View: What the Body Knows

The body is a faithful historian. It records what the mind tries to archive, storing unfinished stories in muscle and breath. Emotional pain, left unresolved, weaves itself into posture and heartbeat until it becomes a quiet rhythm beneath awareness. Chronic resentment has been shown to raise cortisol, narrow the arteries, and disrupt the delicate cadence of sleep (Mayo Clinic, 2022). Even anger held in silence leaves its mark: a jaw set for battle, shoulders lifted as if bracing for a blow. Over time, vigilance begins to imitate safety. The body responds to the echo of harm as though the harm were happening again.

Studies from the Stanford Forgiveness Project and the Mayo Clinic confirm what poets suspected long before data caught up: forgiveness is good for your health. In research led by Dr. Frederic Luskin, participants who practiced sustained forgiveness exercises reported lower stress levels, reduced blood pressure, and a greater sense of vitality and purpose (Luskin, 2003). The heart rate steadied. Breathing deepened. The parasympathetic nervous system—the body’s rest-and-repair mechanism—reawakened. When energy is no longer burned in defense, healing begins to rise to the surface like a long-held breath released.

Science often names this moment homeostasis restored: the body’s return to balance after a prolonged alarm. Yet there is poetry in that physiology. As adrenaline recedes, blood flow increases to the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for empathy, imagination, and moral reasoning (Davidson & McEwen, 2012). Forgiveness, in this sense, literally makes room for thought. The mind, freed from its defensive crouch, can turn toward creation again!

Further studies at Harvard Medical School show that forgiveness lowers the intensity of rumination, which is defined as the mental replay of pain that sustains anxiety and depression (Toussaint et al., 2016). As forgiveness increases, so do emotional regulation, compassion, and self-understanding. The neurochemical shifts that accompany this process—the rise of serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine—mirror what theology has always known intuitively: peace has a pulse.

The language of biology cannot fully capture mercy’s mystery, but it nods in agreement. The data point and the psalm say the same thing in different tongues: bitterness is exhausting, and peace restores breath.

The Artistic View: What Story Teaches

If science tells us what forgiveness does, art shows us what it feels like. Story, painting, music, and theatre have been charting mercy long before the lab coat came on the scene. The arts, at their best, don’t offer conclusions so much as rehearsals for compassion. They let us practice seeing the world as if we were not the center of it.

Across centuries, artists have returned to the same paradox: that true release begins with recognition, that we must face what wounds us before we can let it go. Before there can be reconciliation, there must be sight. In theatre, we call this “see something, go to it.” A character can’t transform until they look directly at what they most want to avoid, which in fairness, is also true for the rest of us. The moment of seeing becomes the hinge between chaos and calm, the instant when self-defense gives way to understanding.

Shakespeare understood this idea better than most. In The Tempest, Prospero spends years nursing the perfect grudge—a full-bodied vintage of resentment aged on a remote island. When his enemies are finally within reach, however, vengeance no longer satisfies. What changes is not his memory of the wound but his perception of what keeping it costs him. By the end, his forgiveness frees everyone, himself included. Prospero’s great spell isn’t the one that conjures storms; it’s the one that breaks them.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman tells the same story from the opposite direction. Willy Loman spends his life mistaking performance for love, selling charm as success, rehearsing confidence he does not feel, and measuring worth in applause that never lasts. When the illusion collapses, his son Biff must decide what to do with the disappointment that remains. In the play’s final moments, standing by his father’s grave, Biff says quietly, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong.” It sounds like condemnation, but it’s something closer to release. For the first time, he sees his father not as idol or enemy, but as a man, confused, frightened, and human. That clarity is the beginning of mercy.

Theatre lets us watch this recognition from a safe distance. We sit in the dark, watching someone else wrestle with the same ghosts we have been dodging at home. In that strange alchemy, something shifts. We learn to see both our own flaws and those of the people we love with gentler eyes. Forgiveness, like theatre, depends on presence. It asks us to stay in the light long enough for truth to take shape so we can look at what wounds us until it becomes something we can understand.

Art doesn’t tell us how to forgive; it simply lets us imagine that we could. The gallery, the concert hall, and the stage are all rehearsal rooms for mercy. They remind us, kindly, that we’re all works in progress and that sometimes, the best apology is a story told well enough to make us listen.

The Theological View: When Justice Turns Toward Grace

The story of forgiveness begins in a garden where trust breaks and fear takes its place. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they hide among the trees. God’s first response to sin is pursuit, not punishment. “But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ ” (Genesis 3:9). That question has echoed through every century since. From the beginning, divine justice speaks with the voice of mercy.

By the time Cain and Abel bring their offerings, the seeds of comparison have already taken root. “And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Genesis 4:4–5). Envy rises, and God speaks again, not with condemnation but with warning and grace: “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Yet Cain resists correction. Pride overcomes humility, and the first human family is torn apart. The sin is more than violence; it is the refusal to trust the goodness of God.

That same resistance runs through every generation. Whenever love seems uneven, pride still resists grace. Humanity reaches for fairness when what it needs is mercy. We grow older, but we keep measuring ourselves against others. We call it success or reward, yet beneath it lies the same belief that effort should equal outcome.

In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus brings this struggle home, where fairness and love collide. The elder brother protests, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29). His reasoning is mathematically sound and spiritually hollow. Fairness asks to be recognized; love asks to be shared. The father answers, “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32). With that, the ledger burns and the story becomes a feast.

Forgiveness, in this light, is the fulfillment of justice rather than its suspension. On the cross, balance does not return to its old shape; it is made new. Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The world’s scales of fairness cannot contain such love. The innocent bears the guilt so that the guilty may live. Through His death and resurrection, a new creation begins: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

To forgive is not weakness but obedience to Christ. It is participation in His strength, a living reflection of His mercy. In forgiveness, we join the movement of the Triune God who acts as one—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—calling, redeeming, and renewing all things. This is the rhythm of redemption, the divine mercy that restores the world.

Across every field, forgiveness reveals its pattern. Psychology traces it in the mind, science measures it in the body, art renders it in story and song, and theology anchors it in the heart of God. Together, they show that forgiveness is not the end of justice but its perfection. It steadies the mind, calms the body, restores imagination, and opens the soul to grace. Fairness seeks balance; forgiveness seeks resurrection. Fairness tallies what was lost; forgiveness restores what can live again.

For more essays by Jill Szoo Wilson, visit my Substack.