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.
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