What Do You Do When the Bad Guy Really Is Bad?

There are seasons in life when the world feels darker than you expected it to be. For a long time, I've held onto the belief that every cruel person must have been shaped by pain, that if you traced their story back far enough you would find a wounded child who never learned another way to live. And sometimes that’s true. Sometimes brokenness begins so early that a person spends their whole life reacting to wounds they can’t name. I’ve written about that before — about the tragedy of the child who never received the tenderness they needed, the one whose small spark of goodness was crushed before it had a chance to grow. That kind of reflection still matters to me. It still feels true.

But lately I’ve been confronted with another truth, one I didn’t want to see: some people choose cruelty. Not out of desperation. Not out of trauma. Not because they were cornered or confused. Some people harm because they enjoy the power it gives them. Some people take pleasure in domination. Some people cultivate cruelty the way others cultivate kindness. And facing that reality has shaken me more than I expected. It’s one thing to grieve the wounds that shape a soul; it’s another to acknowledge the existence of people who seem to have no desire for healing at all.

Stories have been the catalyst for this shift — films that portray violence as a system rather than an accident, documentaries that reveal a kind of coldness that defies explanation, novels that refuse to soften the truth about human nature. These encounters have forced me to see that innocence is not the default state of the world. They’ve made me realize that some hearts harden not by accident but by choice. And once you see that, you can’t pretend otherwise.

This raises painful questions about how we respond to evil in this life. History is full of examples that resist easy categorization. The Nuremberg trials were an attempt to draw a moral boundary after unimaginable atrocities. Were the executions themselves a perpetuation of violence, or were they a necessary acknowledgment that some acts cannot be allowed to stand? The French Revolution, on the other hand, shows how justice can twist into terror when it loses its restraint. These examples remind me that justice in this world is always imperfect, yet the absence of justice is worse. We cannot allow cruelty to run unchecked, but we must also guard our own hearts so that we do not become cruel in the name of stopping it. That tension is exhausting, but it’s real.

And then there are the "quieter" evils — greed, exploitation, systems that grind people down. These are hard to confront because they are woven into the fabric of society. You can feel helpless in the face of them. You can feel small. You can feel like the world is shaped by forces you cannot influence. And in those moments, the idea that “everyone is good deep down” feels not just naïve but dangerous. It blinds you to the reality that some people will take advantage of your softness if you let them.

Yet even as I acknowledge all of this, something in me still reaches for hope. Not a naïve hope that denies the existence of cruelty, but a deeper hope rooted in the belief that God does not stand far off from the darkness we fear. The heart of the Christian story is not that God saves us from a safe distance, but that He enters the depths with us. Jesus does not avoid the places where cruelty reigns; He walks straight into them. He is betrayed, mocked, tortured, and killed by the very kind of malice that unsettles me now. He suffers not only for us but with us, taking on the full weight of human evil — not to excuse it, but to break its power from the inside.

This is what steadies me when the world feels too dark: Jesus does not flinch from the cruelty we can barely look at. He does not turn away from the people we cannot imagine redeeming. He descends into the deepest places — the places where innocence is shattered, where violence is normalized, where hearts grow cold — and He carries light into them. I don’t pretend to understand how God deals with the truly cruel. I don’t pretend to know what justice looks like in eternity. But I do believe that His reach extends further than mine. I believe He sees the whole story, including the parts we cannot fathom. And I believe that no darkness is deeper than the One who entered it.

So I live in the tension. I acknowledge the reality of cruelty without letting it harden me. I recognize that some people choose darkness, yet I hold onto the hope that God can reach places I cannot. I don’t have to decide who is redeemable. I don’t have to solve the mystery of justice. I don’t have to carry the burden of fixing the world. I only have to walk through it with open eyes and an open heart, trusting that the One who descended into our deepest darkness has not abandoned us to it.

From Brutality to Mercy: Imagining a Different Future

I’ve been thinking lately about how cultures change, and how rarely that change happens all at once. It came to mind while reading Game of Thrones, of all things, because the Dothraki are such an exaggerated picture of a culture built on violence, domination, and taking what you can by force. They’re almost a caricature of brutality, and yet even there, you can imagine what the very first steps of reform might look like. Daenerys doesn’t transform them into peaceful citizens overnight. She barely changes anything at all. But she plants a seed—a refusal to accept certain practices, a different way of leading, a small shift in what is considered honorable. It’s not a revolution. It’s barely a ripple. But it’s something.

And that “something” has been sitting with me, because it mirrors a pattern I see in Scripture far more than the instant, dramatic transformations we sometimes expect. When I look at the Old Testament, I don’t see God dropping a fully formed ethical system onto a people who are ready to live it out. I see Him meeting a community shaped by slavery, tribal warfare, and deeply ingrained cultural norms, and then nudging them—slowly, patiently—toward justice, mercy, and covenant faithfulness. The laws often look like steps forward rather than final ideals, not because God changes, but because people do. It’s a long arc, not a single moment.

Sometimes I think we forget that. We read a command and assume it represents the end of the journey rather than the next step. But if you trace the story from Genesis to the prophets to Jesus, you can see the movement: from vengeance to restraint, from hierarchy to dignity, from rivalry to faithfulness, from “do not do this” to “love one another.” It’s not that the early commands were wrong; it’s that they were part of a process. God was working with people where they were, not where they would eventually be.

And this is where Jesus becomes the center of the whole story for me. In His life, death, and resurrection, I see the clearest picture of who God is and what God has been moving humanity toward all along. Jesus doesn’t just teach a higher ethic; He embodies it. He shows what love looks like in a human life, what mercy looks like in action, what it means to treat every person with dignity. If the Old Testament is the long, slow shaping of a people, then Jesus is the moment where the shape finally comes into focus. He is the revelation that all those small steps were pointing toward. He is God in flesh.

That’s why the Dothraki example stuck with me. Not because I expect George R. R. Martin to write a sweeping cultural transformation—he probably won’t—but because it reminded me how reform actually works. It’s slow. It’s resisted. It’s generational. It starts with someone saying, “This one thing needs to change,” even if everything else stays the same for a long time. And over time, those small shifts accumulate into something that looks like a new way of being.

It makes me wonder how often we expect instant change in our own world, or in our churches, or even in ourselves, when the biblical pattern is almost always gradual. Maybe the question isn’t “Why isn’t everything fixed yet?” but “What seeds are being planted now that might bear fruit later?” And maybe part of faith is trusting that God is patient enough to work with us step by step, even when the steps feel painfully small.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear how this registers with you and how you’ve seen slow change—whether in your own life, your church experience, or the “thou‑shalt‑nots” you grew up with—and how Jesus has shaped the way you understand transformation over time.

The Surprising Weight of Goodness in a Dark World

I finally read Game of Thrones this year, and what surprised me wasn’t the story itself but how strange it felt to cross a line I’d been taught not to cross. For years the series lived in that mental category of “things Christians shouldn’t touch,” but when I finally picked it up, the reality was so different from the warnings that I’ve been trying to understand what exactly I was afraid of.

The world of Westeros is undeniably violent, and some cultures in it—like the Dothraki—are built on practices I find deeply wrong. I don’t want to soften that. But even in the middle of all that brutality, I kept finding something I didn’t expect: a sense of humanity. Not the polished kind where everyone behaves well, but the kind that wrestles with loyalty, honor, fear, and the desire to do what is right in a broken world. I disagreed with plenty of choices the characters made, and I skipped a few paragraphs here and there, yet the story wasn’t the moral void I had been warned about. If anything, the weight of the darkness made the moments of goodness stand out more clearly.

It made me wonder what actually makes a story “good” in the deeper sense. I’ve started to think that a good story needs some echo of the longing we all carry for something higher—truth, justice, mercy, restoration. Christians believe that longing ultimately points toward Jesus, even if a story never names Him. And sometimes, even in a harsh fictional world, you can see characters reaching for something better than what surrounds them. That reaching matters. It’s part of what keeps a story from collapsing into emptiness.

What surprised me most wasn’t the book but the fear that kept me from reading it. That fear wasn't malicious; it was meant to protect. But fear can flatten things, turning a complex work of art into a simple warning label. And when everything ends up in the “dangerous” box, it becomes harder to know which warnings actually matter. I don’t want to swing to the opposite extreme and read things out of defiance. What I want is discernment—an honest sense of what is good for me and what isn’t—without fear or rebellion steering the decision.

I’m not writing this to convince anyone to read Game of Thrones. If someone feels uneasy about it, that’s reason enough to stay away. And the show, from what I’ve heard, is a different animal altogether. My point isn’t that this particular story is harmless or universally appropriate. It’s simply that my own experience didn’t match the dire warnings I’d absorbed, and that mismatch has left me thinking about how we talk about art, danger, and conscience.

Maybe the real question isn’t “Should Christians read this?” but “What happens when fear becomes our primary filter for engaging with stories?” I don’t have a neat answer, but I’m grateful for the chance to ask it—and grateful, too, for the reminder that my faith isn’t as fragile as I once assumed.

Thanks for reading. I’d genuinely love to hear where you land on this, and what your own experiences have been with the “thou‑shalt‑nots” we sometimes inherit in church life.