The Case for Grace

February 9, 2026

Greetings from the tattered cover,

I stopped to pick up a man on the side of the expressway.  There was a moment, about one second too long, where I decided not to.  In that span, I thought about why I should not pick him up, including the inconvenience, the risk of stopping on the highway, and the danger of picking up a stranger on the road.

The man was Chuck.  His car broke down on the edge of three lanes of speeding cars. This, on top of a day of bad luck for him that would be hard to recreate in a week. I couldn’t have known any of this as I sped by him at 70 mph.

The second I spent changing my mind about Chuck, and then lurching to the shoulder, took me two hundred yards from where he trudged along the snowy highway.  In the minute it took for us to come face to face, I wondered about my decision. Why choose to help when I just decided not to?

I hesitated to write this because it could make the wrong point about me.  Which is easy to do.

We are a complex species, built of our experiences and our beliefs, and influenced by how we were raised and what just happened to us and maybe what we had for breakfast.  This is who we are as we carom around between everyone else, who are at least as complicated.

And in the event we actually meet another person, we feel confident forming an opinion about who they are, one which is immunized to change by our conviction about our own imperfect judgment.  This is the chaotic math problem we are all faced with and are often comfortable ignoring. We are all walking contradictions, subject to the foibles of humanity, but rarely do we consider that as we create a reaction to other people.

For example, I’m a selfish, racist, sexist, liberal, bonehead.  And I’m not.

There is no shortage of generalization labels for us to apply; religious, political, racial, gender, age. I’m probably forgetting some. What troubles me this morning is that even knowing everyone is more than just one thing, it sometimes is hard for us to give grace to the folks we meet. We might only see a sliver of who they are, and miss the opportunity of understanding them, maybe liking them.  Even if, as part of their brilliant beauty, they might be a bonehead, too.

There are some parts of my character that are still evolving, and others that are probably set in cement, but these all exist in me, and probably you, and we might find common ground to relate. I am impatient, and patient.  I am judgmental and empathetic, capable of arrogance and humility.  I am a hero and coward, both.  We are all more than one thing, all of the time.  We simply choose, sometimes at the right time, to be one thing or the other.

Later, on the same day that I picked up Chuck on the road, I saw a woman standing at the edge of a parking lot, holding a cardboard sign that said “Please give. Trying to survive winter”.  I could have helped. There was a moment, about one second too long, where I decided not to.  I felt the urge to roll down my window, to offer the dollar I could easily afford, and also felt the skeptical impulse to do nothing.  And I did nothing.

I was the same person, the same experiences in life, the same well of empathy to draw upon.  But in that moment, without analyzing all the variables, I allowed one narrow aspect of me to surface.

I can be thoughtless and considerate. I am capable of indefatigable industriousness and persistent procrastination.  I can be found happily reading Hemingway or Calvin and Hobbes, watching All The President’s Men or Derry Girls.  All in the same afternoon.

That’s who we are, all of us.

It might be fair for the woman in the parking lot to look at me going by, window up, and think, “Privileged white guy, has no compassion.” If she ever had a chance to talk to Chuck, he might change her mind with his more favorable impression of me. Maybe. Because I am a compassionate person who wants to help others.  And also, I am not.

I am made of more than one act of compassion or indifference.  Like you, I’m more than just lists of conflicting attributes, there are some flaws and some strengths that show up every day. We are all these things, and we are more than the sum of these things. That’s sometimes hard to see, but if we are patient, if we give humanity a chance to prove itself, there is hope.

I share this insight about myself in the hopes of planting the seeds of grace, first within me, and maybe with the people who read this, perhaps with those I meet. At various intersections with other people, we summon judgment and create opinions about them, and sometimes a single dimension is not enough. I want to change this, in some small way.  And so, it begins with me.

Some people you disagree with, some post silly things on social media, some make mistakes, some are different or difficult.  You should choose who you want to spend time with, but maybe it’s worth taking a breath and asking questions, giving it a little space, and maybe you find yourself growing your world, and theirs, just a little.

Before I go, the best part of that day was picking up Chuck.  The second-best part was the lesson I learned when I didn’t offer that dollar to the woman in the snow.

Hope this finds you reading between the lines,

David

Copyright © 2026 David Smith