The Strength to be Kind

There's a verse in the Wisdom of Solomon this week that's easy to read past without noticing what it's actually claiming.

"Through such works," the writer says, "God has taught his people that the righteous must be kind, and has filled his children with good hope, because God grants repentance for sins."

Look at the order of that sentence. It doesn't say: be kind, and maybe God will notice and be kind back. It says God was kind first, and that kindness is what taught us kindness was even possible. We didn't invent mercy and hope God would approve. We learned it by watching.

The passage builds its case from somewhere that sounds, at first, like an odd place to start an argument about mercy: God's power. "You are righteous, and you rule over all things righteously," it says, "for your strength is the source of your righteousness." The strength is what makes the mercy make sense.

That cuts against a fairly common instinct — the idea that leniency is what you settle for when you don't have the strength to do otherwise. We tend to treat mercy as a kind of concession. As if the person who lets something go must not have had much of a case to make in the first place. As if patience is really just powerlessness wearing a nicer coat.

Wisdom argues the opposite. It takes real strength to leave something unresolved. Anyone can lash out — that just takes an instinct and a moment of provocation. What takes strength is staying steady enough, secure enough in what you have, that you don't need to prove it by how hard you come down on someone. This isn't a God who is lenient because God is weak. This is a God whose leniency only makes sense because underneath it there's nothing insecure, nothing anxious, nothing that needs to win.

You've probably seen a human version of this. The most confident people you know are rarely the ones who need to have the last word. The most competent people you know are usually the ones willing to let you struggle a little before they step in, because they trust exactly how much room there is before things actually go wrong. It's the newer, less certain among us who hover, who can't leave anything alone. Real strength tends to look like room held open rather than a grip held tight.

If that's true of God, the passage says, it has to become true of us too. We learn kindness the way a child learns a language — by hearing it spoken around them long before they can form the sentence themselves. We learned kindness was possible because we were shown it first. If we were only ever shown power that had to prove itself by never letting anything go, that's the only kind of strength we'd know how to imitate.

So ask yourself this week: where are you currently mistaking a tight grip for strength?

That's not weakness, letting go. According to this reading, it might be the clearest evidence of strength there is.