Someone shared a quote the other day about how you don’t have to compromise your convictions to be compassionate. On its own, that’s true. I’d even sign it. What sat strange with me is who shared it. Someone who, not long ago, unfriended me over the kids I take in. I don’t say that to throw a stone. I say it because it sent me back to the one question underneath all of this. What does compassion that doesn’t compromise actually look like?
I went looking for the answer where I should have all along. Not in a meme.
So let me clear the air, because I still need to. I only open Facebook Messenger about every couple of months, and almost every time I do, there’s another message waiting about the kids I take in. Specifically about the teenagers who are trans, or who think they might be gay, or who land somewhere in that space and don’t have the words for it yet. I’ve said this before, more than once, but the questions keep coming. So I’ll say it plainly here, and then I’ll show you why.
I take in those kids on purpose. Not in spite of my faith. Because of it.
I know how that sounds to some of you, because some of you have told me. The usual version is that love without correction isn’t really love, and that to welcome someone before calling them to change is to compromise the truth. That deserves better than a meme and better than a dismissal, so I’m not going to hand you a single verse and call it settled. I want to walk through what’s actually there.
The order is the whole thing
Start with the sentence the entire gospel hangs on. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Sit with the timing. Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not once we got our lives in order. While we were still in the middle of the wreckage, at our worst, with nothing to offer. That is when the welcome came.
That isn’t a soft, sentimental add-on to Christianity. It’s the engine of it. God moved first. The acceptance came before the change, and the acceptance is what made the change possible at all. Anybody who tells you the order runs the other way, that people have to get right before they can be welcomed in, has the gospel backwards. Not heretical. Not faking. Often deeply sincere. Just backwards.
Hold that order in your hand, because everything else is watching it play out.
Look at who he went toward
Jesus had a reputation, and he didn’t fight it. They called him “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Matthew 11:19), and instead of defending himself, he owned it. He invited himself to Zacchaeus’s house before Zacchaeus had changed a single thing. The transformation came after dinner, after the welcome, never as the cover charge to get in the door.
Here’s the part that should stop us. The people Jesus spoke to most sharply were never the ones whose lives were visibly messy. His hardest words went to the religiously confident, the ones he said “shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” (Matthew 23:13). The gatekeepers. The people sure their convictions made them the safe ones.
I notice that, because the accusation of “compromise” almost always gets pointed at the people doing the welcoming. Jesus pointed it the other direction.
The one story that holds both halves
Now to the passage I think about most, because it holds the whole tension in one scene and refuses to flinch from either side of it. The woman caught in adultery, John 8.
Notice the setup before you notice anything else. The scribes and Pharisees drag her in “caught in the act” and stand her up in front of everyone. But adultery takes two people, and the man is nowhere. If this were really about the law, both of them would be standing there. She isn’t a defendant. She’s bait. The text says so outright. They did this “to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him” (v.6). Her life was being used as ammunition in an argument that was really about winning. That’s worth naming, because it’s the same move I see today. Someone’s “lifestyle” turned into a weapon in a fight that isn’t actually about them.
Then Jesus bends down, writes in the dirt, and says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” One by one they leave. He doesn’t debate the law. He doesn’t put her on trial. He clears the circle until she is safe.
And then the two lines that matter most, in the order they actually come. He asks if anyone is left to condemn her. No one is. And he says, “Neither do I condemn you.”
That comes first. Full stop. He does not say “I’ll hold off on condemning you if you change.” The acquittal is free, complete, and unconditional, and it lands before he says one word about how she lives.
Only then, safe and uncondemned and knowing she will not be destroyed, does she hear “go, and from now on sin no more.”
I know that last line is the one some of you want to hand me, and I’m glad to take it, because it proves the point instead of breaking it. The call to a changed life is real. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t on the page. But look where it sits. After the safety. After the welcome. After “neither do I condemn you.” The change is invited inside the safety, never demanded as the price of it. Nobody has ever been transformed while standing in a circle of people holding rocks. People change after somebody refuses to throw.
That’s the entire thing. Welcome first, always first. The invitation to grow happens inside arms that have already closed around you, not as the toll to get in.
Which brings me to the kids
“Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). And when Jesus describes the day everything gets sorted out, the line that divides isn’t doctrine. It’s this. “I was a stranger and you took me in” (Matthew 25:35).
A teenager who has been thrown out, or who is bracing to be, is the stranger in distress. The orphan in their distress. And a kid who is gay or trans is far more likely to be exactly that kid. The one who got handed back, aged out, told there was no room. I am not stretching a single verse to get to them. The whole arc was pointing at them the entire time.
So when someone needs a safe place and doesn’t know God yet, my job is not to make the safety conditional on the believing. My job is to be the welcome that comes first. The way it came first for me. The way it came first for all of us “while we were still sinners.” If something changes in that kid’s life, it will change the way it always changes. Inside the safety, never as the cost of it.
I’m not waiting for a vote on this. I already heard the instruction. Love unconditionally. Make a safe place for people who may not know him and just need somewhere safe to land.
People keep asking how I can be so sure. Here’s the honest answer. I didn’t pour this fast. A meme is spray paint. It looks bold and it’s dry in a minute. What I believe about welcome went down slow, layer over layer, the whole arc of who Jesus went toward and what he did first, including the verse people hand me to end the conversation. I poured the foundation slowly and I checked it myself before it set. This is concrete that’s been poured over thirty years. That’s why it holds when somebody leans on it. You can’t lean a real weight on paint.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. A couple of months ago, in the middle of finally untangling something that had sat crooked for almost twenty years, someone defended me. Someone who had every reason rooted in our history to take the other side. She didn’t. She stood with me.
The right thing got done by the person least obligated to do it. I’d like to think I’m just trying to do the same thing for kids who have never once had it, and standing on something that won’t move while I do.