Lent 2026 · Day 22: Love, Cruelty, and the Choice to Remain Human

Human connection is essential to survival.

Even the most introverted among us still need community, belonging, and people who know our stories. Friends. Family. Chosen family. People who show up.

I have no biological family in Rochester, yet somehow I’ve built a wide network of people here. Within that circle is a much smaller group of close friends who are family in every meaningful sense of the word. That community is one of the reasons I’ve been able to thrive here.

For many queer people, chosen family isn’t just nice to have. It’s necessary.

Too many people are pushed out of their families simply for living honestly. That kind of rejection has always felt deeply un-Jesus-like to me. I somehow missed the part of Christianity where cruelty toward others became holy.

The version of the Gospel I grew up holding onto sounded more like this:

Love your neighbor.

Care for the vulnerable.

Let the one without sin throw the first stone.

Not condemnation. Not exclusion.

And yet cruelty shows up everywhere.

People twist scripture to justify domination, oppression, and exclusion. Entire systems of power have been built on convincing people that cruelty is righteousness.

It makes you wonder how human beings can become so detached from empathy.

Researchers have studied this question for years. Psychologists talk about how cruelty often grows out of a breakdown in empathy, the ability to see another person as fully human.

When empathy disappears, cruelty becomes easy.

And cruelty doesn’t always look like the villains we imagine.

Sometimes it looks like someone who is charming. Loving. Magnetic.

Which brings up the complicated conversations people had about "It Ends With Us," both the book and the movie.

Some people argue the story glamorizes abuse. Others say it captures an uncomfortable truth, that abusers aren’t always obvious monsters.

Sometimes cruelty hides behind affection.

Sometimes it begins with love that slowly becomes possessive.

Sometimes it sounds like an apology wrapped in promises that never quite hold.

Sometimes it’s a comment you excuse.

A shove you minimize.

A slap you tell yourself wasn’t “that bad.”

And sometimes it never touches your body at all.

It just slowly erodes who you are until you forget who you were before the relationship began.

I understand cruelty more personally than I would like.

I grew up with an abusive father, mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically.

I never saw him hit my mother, but I saw the way he controlled her life. The finances. The decisions. The power.

And I felt the violence directly.

When I was thirteen, I found out about my father’s infidelity, and I asked my mom why she didn’t leave.

She said something that has stayed with me my entire life.

“How could I? I had four kids and no money. I stayed because I had to. Aren't you happy I stayed?”

Part of me understood.

Part of me wished she had run.

Both of those truths lived inside me at the same time.

The strange thing about growing up in a house like that is you don’t actually know it’s different from other families.

When you’re a kid, you think your life is normal because it’s the only life you know. It wasn’t until I started watching TV and spending time at my friends’ houses that I began to realize… wait, this isn’t how other families work.

Not everyone grows up hiding from their father.

Not everyone learns how to read someone’s moods and reactions just to know when they’re about to get hit.

Abuse shouldn’t be normal. But when you grow up inside it, it becomes the fog you live in.

My father wasn’t an evil man. He was a complicated man. He struggled with bipolar disorder and narcissism, and he carried a lot of damage from his own childhood. His father was an alcoholic and violent. Trauma has a way of traveling through generations when nobody knows how to stop it.

When I was younger, I idolized him. As a child he seemed larger than life. But by the time I was thirteen, I had learned to love and hate him at the same time. It wasn’t constant violence, but I grew up walking on eggshells, as people say. He knew where to hit too. Places teachers wouldn’t see. Places neighbors wouldn’t notice. Bruises and welts hidden under clothing.

One fateful night, so very long ago, there was a disturbance in the force.

My sister had climbed out her bedroom window to meet friends. Just normal dumb teenage behavior. When my father realized she wasn’t in bed, he was furious.

He turned to me and asked, point-blank, “Where’s your sister?”

I knew exactly where she was.

But I wasn’t going to tell him.

Part of it was teenage stubbornness. But part of it was protection. I knew the kind of trouble my sister would get from my dad.

I said, "I don't know."

And in that moment I saw it and could feel his rage about to explode. It was in his eyes. I knew he was going to hit me.

So before he could raise his fist, I hit him first.

One punch. Right into his stomach.

Thirteen years old. Furious. Terrified. All of it at the same time.

And then chaos. We were brawling.

My memory of that moment, with age and time, is blurry. But I remember my mom yelling. My brother scared and confused. And my oldest sister suddenly appeared like the only reasonable adult in the room.

And then something strange happened.

Instead of the night turning into more violence, my oldest sister made all of us step back, calm down, and sit in the living room.

We talked.

For an immigrant Asian family, that was strange and almost unheard of. Families like ours didn’t talk about conflict. We absorbed it. We endured it. We pretended it didn’t happen.

But that night we talked.

I don’t remember every word that was said. But I remember saying something very clearly.

If he ever hit me again, I would call child protective services.

And none of us wanted that.

Something shifted that night.

My father never laid a hand on me again.

Or on my siblings.

I don’t recommend violence as a solution. A thirteen-year-old punching her father is not exactly a model for healthy conflict resolution.

But in that moment it was the only way I knew how to take some power back. Because if we’re honest, cruelty is often about power.

Who has it.

Who loses it.

And what happens when someone refuses to give it away anymore.

In some strange way, that night changed the trajectory of our family.

The cycle stopped.

My siblings never raised their children the way we were raised. The hurt we experienced didn’t get passed down to another generation.

That doesn’t erase what happened.

But it does mean the story didn’t end the same way it began.

Many families don’t get a moment where the balance of power suddenly flips. More often those stories end quietly, or tragically, in ways that never make headlines until it’s too late.

And even as an adult, I’ve found myself in emotionally abusive relationships too.

Those moments where you step back and ask yourself a painful question... "How did I let this happen?"

Love doesn’t always make good choices.

Sometimes it’s trauma bonding.

Sometimes it’s familiarity.

Sometimes it’s a version of ourselves we haven’t healed yet.

Cruelty thrives in those spaces where empathy breaks down and control replaces care.

And yet, despite everything I’ve seen and experienced, cruelty still feels foreign to me.

I’ve been angry. Hurt. Betrayed.

But the idea of intentionally destroying another human being simply because I could is so far outside my emotional wiring that it’s difficult for me to comprehend.

Even ostracizing someone from a community feels harsh to me.

If a situation becomes toxic, my instinct is to walk away, not erase a person from existence.

Which brings me back to Lent.

Lenten Reflection: Choosing Love in a Cruel World

The letter of First Epistle of Peter reminds us:

“Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing.”

That can sound almost impossible when you’ve experienced cruelty up close.

Choosing love does not mean ignoring injustice.

It does not mean tolerating abuse.

And it certainly does not mean allowing cruelty to continue unchecked.

What it means is refusing to let cruelty reshape who we become.

It means standing up for people who are vulnerable.

Holding others accountable when harm is done.

Protecting ourselves when necessary.

But doing those things without allowing bitterness, hatred, or revenge to turn us into the very thing we are trying to resist.

Cruelty spreads easily in the world. It multiplies when people stop seeing each other as human.

Empathy takes intention.

Compassion takes effort.

Love, real love, takes courage.

Every time we choose empathy over cruelty, we interrupt that cycle just a little bit.

Sometimes the resistance is loud. Sometimes it’s public.

But more often it’s quiet. It’s the decision to remain human in situations that try very hard to strip that humanity away.

And sometimes that quiet resistance is the most powerful thing we can do.

Take care of yourselves.

And take care of each other. 💛

** If you or someone you know is living with domestic violence, you don’t have to face it alone. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or at thehotline.org for confidential support.

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