Rose-Colored Glasses
For some of us, it is easy to keep moving through life in a kind of bliss, never fully acknowledging the realities other people face or have faced. Sometimes that may be innocent ignorance. Sometimes it may be willful. At other times, it may be a form of denial because we know that looking more closely could disturb something we have worked hard to keep undisturbed.
We use words such as home as though everyone understands them in the same way. For some people, home means warmth in the winter, a cool place to escape the summer heat, familiar meals, comfort, love, acceptance, good smells, and memories that feel safe. The word carries a sense of belonging because that is what they have known.
For others, the word may feel empty. It may not bring up any of that. It may be tied to instability, fear, loss, or a place they learned to endure rather than enjoy. In some lives, the idea of home feels so unfamiliar that the word itself seems lost in translation, as though someone is speaking a language for which no interpreter can provide an equivalent meaning.
Safety can carry the same divide. Some people move through life expecting certain places and people to protect them. Others have learned that safety is uncertain and must be evaluated from moment to moment. They notice exits, read the room, and remain aware of what could change. That awareness never fully turns off, even in rooms that are supposed to be safe.
Someone else's reality does not always mean that ours is false. Two people can carry different truths shaped by different lives. Their pain does not erase our joy, and their struggle does not make our safety dishonest. Yet we can still feel threatened when another person's experience challenges what we have believed to be normal.
Perhaps the threat is not that their truth will destroy ours. It's that it will require something from us.
Stepping away from rose-colored glasses can feel awkward and uncomfortable because those glasses may have protected us from seeing the weight other people carry. Removing them means choosing to look beyond what has been easy for us to believe. It means recognizing that the meanings we attach to ordinary words are shaped by what we have experienced and that our understanding is not universal.
When we allow ourselves to look unguardedly into the lives of people who are not like us, do not look like us, or come from cultures we do not understand, we may realize we did not understand as much as we thought. We may encounter something that presses against beliefs we have held for years. New awareness may bump against the carefully arranged china cabinets of our hearts, rattling what we assumed would always remain in place.
That discomfort can feel like a threat, but it may be a sign of maturity instead. It could be the heart of God making room in us for the pain of another person.
Is that what compassion means?
Compassion is not always gentle at first. Sometimes it hurts because it disturbs the spaces we have carefully prepared and protected. It interrupts the comfort of believing that our experience is the measure of everyone else's life.
I think about the words of Matthew 16:25, where Jesus speaks about losing one's life in order to find it. It may be a stretch to connect that passage directly to surrendering comfort for the sake of another person. Maybe it is. But perhaps part of losing a life built around self-protection is becoming willing to let someone else's pain matter to us.
And if we do, we may begin to think about them differently. We may pray for them with greater understanding. We may pause long enough to offer a little grace before our responses fire off.
Stepping away from rose-colored glasses doesn't mean rejecting everything good we've known. It means recognizing that goodness hasn't been everyone's experience. Once we see that, compassion can enter the places where ease once kept us blind.
