It seems most of us were raised with a right/wrong lens. Let’s call it the “sin” lens. It’s the way we see the world. But I think there are a couple of other lenses…the grace lens and the wound lens. The grace lens seems rare, even for people of faith. We have a hard time believing we can truly be unconditionally loved and accepted. Still, we want the grace lens to supplant the sin lens. We really do. And we can, although in my experience, it takes time.

But I want to focus on the wound lens. What if we put that contact lens in before the sin one? We would see others differently. We would shift our focus from the sins of the wrongdoers, the immoral, the people we don’t like, and even ourselves, to their/our wounds. For example, we can remember that 85% of young people in prison come from fatherless homes. Stuff like that. Then our hearts break instead of hardening.

I think God uses our wounds, blessings, and even our sins to shape us, if we let him. He can create a beautiful quilt from the pieces of our lives, the pretty ones and the not-so-pretty ones. I’m certainly not excusing people’s sins. We’ve all fallen short of God’s ideals and even our own. Some haven’t let the reshaping happen, so the junk lingers. Still, when I look through a wounds lens, I soften towards others and myself.

We live in a wounded world. To me, looking at it that way is an act of grace.