Liberty’s campus is relatively large—not so large, perhaps, as Duke’s campus, or Brown University, or something…but it’s biggerish. And parking is ridiculous…so in order to avoid the trauma of having to potentially find a parking spot more than once in a day? We walk. Everywhere. And doubtless, that is good for our characters and our cardiovascular systems, so no complaining on that note.

But yesterday, as I was walking from the cafeteria to the library, I was looking into people’s faces, like I always do when I walk, and I was struck—as I am frequently—by the fact that despite the fact that this is technically a Christian school, there is so much hurt in people’s eyes. And more than half the time, you can’t even catch the eyes, because the face is looking down—drawn, stressed, introspective, and insecure.

By the time I actually made it to the library, I could feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

“God, there’s SO much hurt here, even just on this campus. And we’re the ones that are supposed to have the answers, supposed to be offering hope—where do we start when it comes to mending the broken pieces of this generation, and what role do I—as the individual—play in this?”

It’s frighteningly easy for me not to care. In fact, for the last several months, despite the fact that I was technically doing everything right—spending time in Scripture, and praying for those around me, and being an active part of the church community and blah blah blah—I’ve kinda gone into survival mode, and I’ve had a growing sense of the fact that I was emotionally and spiritually disconnecting…that somehow, the truth that I was reading with the eyes of my mind wasn’t permeating to color the perceptions of my heart…and what I was doing with my hands wasn’t springing from a deep-seated sense of compassion or real caring.

It’s appalling how easily we can delude ourselves—and others—into thinking that going through the motions is the real thing.

God mercifully opened my eyes to the extent of my own callousness last week and gave me a glimpse of the direction in which my heart had turned in sort of an unexpected way. It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was sitting in a parking lot in a car, listening to a friend pour out some of the struggles of his soul…and suddenly I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I’d actively tried to care about somebody besides myself on any real level. And the realization was startling, and humbling…and as I sat there listening, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of shame. God doesn’t always speak in an audible voice, but sometimes…it’s almost audible:

“Thea, what on earth? How do you MISS it this badly for this long? How did you get so caught up in caring so much about what other people think of you, what other people are doing, and how they’re perceiving you that you lost three months of your life when you could have and should have been reaching out to people as they really are and caring for them as they really need to be cared for? Do you think I don’t know it when your heart isn’t with Me? Do you think I can’t sense your relational disconnectedness when your time with Me is just a ritual?”

As I drove home that night, the tears were rolling down my face and making little splashy tracks all over my steering wheel. The big plastic buttons on my coat probably thought it was raining. But somehow, the pain of God bringing us against the brick wall of a harsh realization is a pain that is redemptive, restorative, and freeing—and the tears were a good thing.

My prayer since then has been that God would keep my heart tender—that I would never become immune to the pain of others, that my eyes would never be able to ignore the needs, and that my heart would never be able to refuse to weep for those who are bleeding inside. It’s overwhelming to live this way. It’s beyond the handling capacity of my emotional and physical resources. But perhaps we were designed and called to live in a way that demands of us more strength than we have and more love than we are capable of giving so that we never come to the point of thinking that we no longer have a need for the One whose unending strength and infinite love have enabled men to do the seemingly-impossible since the beginning of the human race.