What would Jesus say to people hurt by the church?

Dear One,

I know you. I have always known you.

I know the way your skepticism was born — not from indifference, but from something far more honest than that. You watched. You paid attention. And what you saw done in my name — the things done to you in my name — gave you every reason to turn away. I want you to know something before we go any further together: that was not me. The people who did those things, do not know me, no matter how much they say they do. They use me. They use my name as a badge to inflict unspeakable wrongs on those whom I love.

You saw people who claimed to carry my light use it instead as a torch to burn others. You saw judgment dressed in the clothing of love. You saw lust for power wearing claiming humility. You saw walls built in my name when I spent every breath of my living days tearing walls down. You saw the vulnerable turned away at the very doors that claimed to be open in my honor. And something deep within you — something ancient and true that was placed inside you long before you ever heard my name spoken aloud — recoiled. That recoiling was right.

I recoil from those same things.

Let me be plain with you, because I have never had much patience for the ornamental or the evasive. What has been done in my name — the cruelty, the exclusion, the self-righteousness, the violence both quiet and loud — I do not recognize it. It is not mine. A tree is known by its fruit, and I ask you to look carefully at the fruit before you decide what tree you are dealing with. Much of what has been handed to you as me is not me at all. It is a portrait painted by frightened, ambitious, or simply mistaken hands, and I understand completely why you refused to hang it on your wall.

But here is what I ask of you now.

Do not let the forgery convince you there is no original.

I am the original. And I am nothing like what you feared.

I am the one who stopped a crowd from destroying a person they had already decided deserved to be destroyed. I am the one who sat down at tables with the people polite society had written off entirely. I am the one who touched the untouchable, who spoke to the ones no one else would speak to, who looked at the person everyone else looked past and said — you matter, you are seen, you are loved. I am the one who saved my sharpest words not for the broken and the wandering, but for the religious and the certain, the ones who had made a comfortable fortress out of their own righteousness.

I was not safe to the powerful. I was only ever safe to the suffering.

And you — you who have suffered the particular wound of watching love weaponized — you are exactly the one I have always been moving toward.

I do not ask you to trust the institution. I do not ask you to make peace with everything done in my name. I do not ask you to walk through a door that hurt you. I ask only that you consider the possibility that there is something — someone — beneath all of that noise, beneath all of that wreckage, who has been quietly, persistently, reaching toward you across every moment of your life. In the beauty that stopped you once without explanation. In the kindness of a stranger that arrived exactly when it needed to. In the longing you carry that nothing in this world has ever quite satisfied.

I have never needed you to find me through a building or a doctrine or a person who had all the right answers. The divine has always been closer to you than any of those things. It has been in the very breath you are drawing right now, in the conscience that told you something was wrong when you watched my followers act without love, in the part of you that still — even now, even after everything — wonders.

That wondering is a door. And I am standing at it.

Not to demand. Not to condemn. Not to hand you a list of requirements or to tell you everything you have believed until now was worthless. I am standing there the way I have always stood — with open hands, with patience that does not expire, with a love that did not begin when you acknowledged it and will not end if you turn away again.

You have never been outside of that love. Not once. Not for a single moment of your life.

The ones who hurt you in my name were wrong about many things, but perhaps the most damaging thing they were wrong about was this: they made love into something you had to earn, something that could be withheld, something with conditions attached like fine print at the bottom of a contract. That is not love. That is transaction. And I have never been in the business of transaction.

I am only ever in the business of love.

So take your time. Ask your questions — I have never been threatened by an honest question. Bring me your anger, because it is righteous and I can hold it. Bring me your grief over what was done to you and to others in my name, because I grieve it too. Bring me your uncertainty, because certainty was never the price of admission.

Bring me only what you have, which is yourself.

That has always been enough.

That has always been everything.

I have been waiting for you — not with impatience, not with disappointment, but with the kind of waiting that looks like love, because that is precisely what it is.

I am here. I have always been here.

And I am so glad you are beginning to look.