Justice for you, Mercy for me

Earlier today I was inching through stop-and-go traffic on the interstate when I noticed a state patrol officer traveling alone in the HOV lane.

No lights. No siren. Just one person in a patrol car moving steadily past the rest of us while we crawled forward a few car lengths at a time.

I had the same thought that I imagine many drivers have had.

That doesn't seem fair.

If I were driving alone in that lane, I'd expect to be pulled over. Yet here was someone doing exactly that.

Maybe there was a perfectly legitimate reason. Maybe there wasn't. The point is that I didn't know.

What I knew was how it felt.

It felt unjust.

That feeling lasted only a few seconds before it reminded me of an analogy my friend Jessica uses when she talks with her boys about privilege.

Imagine you've spent your entire life driving in the fast lane. There are never any slow cars in front of you. You travel exactly as fast as you want, and no one ever interrupts your progress. Eventually you stop noticing the lane itself because it has become your normal.

Then one day someone merges in front of you.

They have every right to be there.

Nothing has actually been taken from you except the expectation that your lane would remain clear.

And yet what you feel is not inconvenience.

You feel injustice.

That distinction matters.

The feeling is real. But feelings are not always reliable interpreters of reality.

Sometimes what feels unfair is simply our encounter with friction—the ordinary, everyday friction that someone else has been navigating all along.

We rarely notice the advantages we've grown accustomed to until something interrupts them.

That isn't a moral failure so much as a limitation of perspective.

The state trooper may not experience driving in the HOV lane as a privilege at all; it may simply be part of doing his job. The lane doesn't feel exceptional because, from inside the patrol car, it has become ordinary. Most privilege works that way.

Children often say, "He made me angry."

Adults usually use more sophisticated language.

"She disrespected me."

"They left me no choice."

"He forced my hand."

The story changes.

The logic doesn't.

Someone else acted. Therefore I became angry. Therefore my response was justified.

Except that isn't entirely true.

Barring force or coercion, no one can make another adult do anything.

People can wound us.

They can disappoint us.

They can betray us.

But between what happens to me and how I respond lies the only place where I possess genuine freedom.

My response.

This is both a burden and a gift.

Because it means I am not merely the product of everyone else's behavior.

Viktor Frankl spent an entire lifetime teaching this lesson.

It also means that every time I find myself angry, I have an opportunity.

Anger is almost never the first emotion. It is the bodyguard.

Standing behind it is usually fear, or shame, or grief, or hurt, or the fear that something important has been threatened.

So perhaps the better question is not, "Who made me angry?"

Perhaps it is, "Why did this particular moment create so much friction inside me?"

That question shifts my attention from winning an argument to understanding my own heart.

It invites curiosity instead of judgment.

Curiosity is difficult because it refuses to let me remain the hero of my own story.

It asks me to examine my own heart before I examine yours.

That reminds me of another essay I wrote called What Happened Right Before That?

In that piece I asked readers to become curious about the events that precede another person's behavior.

This asks a different question.

What happened inside me right before that?

Right before I became offended.

Right before I became self-righteous.

Right before I decided someone else was the entire problem.

If I am honest, I often discover that what I experienced as injustice was really something else.

The loss of control.

The interruption of expectation.

The discomfort of sharing a road I had unconsciously assumed belonged to me.

That doesn't mean injustice isn't real.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes people truly are oppressed.

Sometimes systems are unfair.

Sometimes evil is exactly what it appears to be.

But not every experience of friction is injustice.

Sometimes friction is simply life.

And sometimes friction is one of God's greatest teachers.

There is a saying often attributed to the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön that there is more suffering caused by our attempts to avoid suffering than by suffering itself.

Whether or not one shares her faith tradition, there is tremendous wisdom in that observation.

Much of our exhaustion comes from demanding a life without friction.

Without inconvenience.

Without interruption.

Without loss.

Without pain.

But suffering has something to teach us that comfort never can.

Suffering, when it does not harden us, enlarges our hearts.

It teaches compassion because it reminds us what it feels like to be weak.

To be afraid.

To need mercy.

Perhaps that is why people who have suffered deeply often become the gentlest people in the room.

Not always.

But often.

They recognize themselves in someone else's pain.

That brings me to Christ.

Jesus had every opportunity to avoid suffering.

He could have come down from the Cross.

He could have silenced His accusers.

He could have ended His pain with a word.

He chose not to.

Not because suffering is good.

But because love is.

The Cross is not a celebration of pain.

It is the revelation that love is willing to remain present in pain.

If the Son of God did not insist on a frictionless life, why should I?

Why do I imagine that I deserve a road without traffic?

A life without interruption?

Relationships without disappointment?

A world that always yields to my desires?

Perhaps the invitation of the Gospel is not to eliminate suffering but to carry it differently.

To let it soften us instead of hardening us.

To let it make us curious instead of judgmental.

To let it remind us that everyone we meet is carrying a cross we cannot see.

There is one final irony.

When someone wrongs me, I want justice.

Immediately.

Completely.

But when I wrong someone else, I hope they will understand.

I hope they'll consider my circumstances.

My intentions.

My difficult week.

My good heart.

Justice for you.

Mercy for me.

I suspect that tension lives in every human heart.

The older I get, the less interested I become in choosing between justice and mercy.

The Cross refuses to choose.

God is perfectly just.

God is perfectly merciful.

And somehow those two meet without contradiction.

Perhaps we are invited to do the same.

To see with what I think of as binocular vision.

To hold my own experience honestly while making room for yours.

To maintain my autonomy without surrendering compassion.

To acknowledge privilege without assuming that those who possess it are malicious.

To seek justice without forgetting my own need for mercy.

To become curious before becoming certain.

Maybe that's what maturity looks like.

Not finding the perfect lane.

But learning to share the road.

And discovering that the friction we spend so much of our lives trying to escape may be the very thing God uses to teach us how to love.