Kindness as a Pathway to Healing: Self-Compassion and the Gospel
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a few deeply thought-provoking quotes from a book I recently read by Adam Young, titled, Make Sense of Your Story. I wanted to share them here—not just to admire them, but to reflect on what they might mean for us, how they challenge or comfort us, and how they fit into the broader biblical narrative of Scripture.
The chapter begins with,
“A year of kindness toward your own heart will take you further on the healing journey than a year of weekly therapy with your dream therapist.”
This stopped me in my tracks. Think about the implications of that statement.
While cognitive counseling methodology can be helpful, this quote hints at something quietly radical: the power of sustained, internal kindness. Kindness is a force. It is like an arrow that pierces straight through the lies we absorbed in childhood or inherited along the way.
That’s why it often feels so unsettling. Deep kindness unravels the narratives built on shame, performance, and perfectionism. It doesn’t just soothe; it disrupts. And yet all the while, it opens the door to another reality—a different kingdom altogether. One where we are invited to relate differently: to ourselves, to others, and to God. For those of us trained to hustle for love or approval, this kind of kindness can feel utterly foreign. And yet, it’s exactly what God offers us in Christ.
“Here is a gut-wrenching truth about the by-product of trauma: the harm you do to yourself through self-contempt is greater than the harm that has been done to you. By self-contempt I simply mean harshness from you to you.”
Self-contempt is one of the most elusive, yet deeply debilitating tactics of evil in our stories. It seeps into the fibers of our being so seamlessly that we rarely notice it's there.
What does your self-talk sound like? Is it a voice of gentleness or a voice of condemnation? Is it a voice that turns the contempt of life towards others or towards yourself?
“That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ, all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do to the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness—what then?”
Jung takes the radical ethic of Jesus—to love our enemies, to care for “the least of these”—and turns it inward. What if you are the beggar you’ve ignored? What if I am the offender I refuse to forgive? What if I could take a look at my story and begin to see that little girl or little boy differently? Could I go back and see where the self contempt started? If we could start offering ourselves the same compassion and empathy we offer the beggar, the outcast, the least of these in society, can we begin to offer ourselves the love Christ is offering to us?
However, we can’t do this on our own.
“We are not meant to enter the dark waters of memory without the presence of comfort and care.”
Healing is not a solitary path. To remember rightly, to touch the old ache with hope, we need more than silence and strength. There is a holy need for care- God’s care coming through the hands of his people.
It is a gift of God that we can’t see our own faces. We need the steady gaze of a trusted friend- someone to reflect what is true- to hold the mirror when our own eyes fail. Receiving the care of another is itself an act of kindness.
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How do we conceptualize this with a Biblical framework? Here is where I have landed with it: offering kindness to ourselves is not indulgent or a secular/new age motif; but is aligning ourselves with the heart of God. It is agreeing with the truth that we are not disposable, not beyond grace, not disqualified from love. When Jesus came as the great physician, he came to bind up our wounds, especially the ones that are well hidden and often forgotten.
Dan Allender says, “You don’t have to respond to your story by joining in violence against yourself. You can respond to your story the way God does—with kindness, even kindness toward your frailty.”
This is God's posture toward us: not disgust, not dismissal—but tenderness. And God uses the power of kindness to show us this. “Kindness, in and of itself, will begin to disrupt the power of evil in your day-to-day life.” - Adam Young.
It’s a way we can break the bonds we have with evil. Where we have aligned with evil and agreed with what it has said about us, kindness is a vehicle that can bring us into alignment with the kingdom of light. Evil thrives on agreement. Every time we echo its condemnation, we deepen its hold. But when we walk in kindness—not denial, but honest, grace-filled compassion—we weaken evil’s grip. We move closer to the light.