File this post under “things we all know and routinely fail to remember.”

I was reading a passage about lepers the other night, about how they were shunned and cut off from society. It got me thinking. If everyone was a leper, where would you send the lepers? That’s not a hypothetical question.

Most everyone knows Romans 3:23 – For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There’s another verse I like a lot that speaks to me in a similar fashion: Hebrews 13:3 – Remember the prisoners as if chained with them, and those who are mistreated, since you yourselves are in the body also.

We are all in the body. We’ve all been prisoners. We shouldn’t shun someone when they are struggling, whether because of sin or an unfortunate situation. Quite the opposite. We should empathize. Remember how it felt when we were in those chains. Lift them up, and hope they do the same for us the next time we need it.

It’s easy to throw stones from our glass houses. To rank sins on a high to low scale. To judge. To do nothing because we are uncomfortable and don’t  know what to say. Or run in fear. To deny or ignore that we are all plagued with some form of this disease. That we share these chains. And that we can help each other break them.