We Will Often Find In One Another What We Look For

Bob Goff once said, “Practice giving the benefit of the doubt to people, and watch compassion for them grow in our hearts.”

Highlight and underline 'practice' in that sentence. A reminder that compassion isn’t automatic. It’s something we must intentionally train our hearts toward, especially in a world that rewards suspicion, cynicism, and judgment far more than grace.

When I think of Jesus, I think of someone who led with the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t need people to prove their worth before offering his presence. He didn’t make them earn compassion. He saw the good in those the world labeled bad, the potential in those others had written off. The woman at the well. The tax collector in the tree. The thief on the cross. Each story begins with Jesus choosing to see something redeemable in someone others had long given up on.

For most of us that's not easy. We live in a culture that sows more doubt in our minds than benefit. We are taught to protect ourselves, to vet people, to assume the worst until proven otherwise. It’s easy to forget that fear and distrust are contagious and that they quietly starve compassion.

I was reminded of this recently when I spoke with a group of prisoners. Many had lived lives that left little to doubt: crimes committed, wrongs done, stories that confirmed every stereotype. But sitting face-to-face, listening to their stories, I found a lot of benefit: Humanity. Regret. Hope. Even beauty.

And here's the thing, the more benefit in them I looked for the more I found. It's often hard to see the benefit in one another if we aren't looking for it.

That’s the miracle of compassion, it doesn’t grow from being told to feel differently. It grows from seeing differently. Giving the benefit of the doubt doesn’t mean pretending harm didn’t happen or excusing choices that cause pain. It means choosing to look at a person and believing there is more to the story and that the story isn’t finished yet.

Unlike Jesus, putting benefit before doubt doesn’t come naturally to us. It takes work. It means confronting our own biases, our need to be right, our addiction to certainty. It means asking whether our first impulse toward others is curiosity or criticism.

Leading with criticism rarely if ever leads to compassion....

I fear if we don’t practice this, we risk becoming a world that leaks compassion faster than it creates it. A world where no one feels safe enough to change because no one believes they actually can.

But when we do practice it, when we pause before judgment, when we listen before labeling, something holy begins to happen. Compassion grows. Hearts soften. Doubt gives way to benefit. And maybe, in those moments, we start to look a little more like Jesus - not because we’ve perfected compassion, but because we’re practicing it.