The Snark | Practical Faith

Shaking Hands with the Hypocrite

Faith is easy when it’s theoretical. We can nod along to all the lofty ideals about forgiveness, mercy, and compassion while sipping our coffee and reading something uplifting. But faith only becomes real when it collides with the people who make us angry, disappoint us, or expose their worst sides when they think no one’s watching.

A while back, I found myself confronted with just that. A man in my social circle – vain, outwardly polished, and apparently unfaithful – acted in a way that left me both angry and disgusted. For weeks, I carried that anger with me like a stone in my pocket. Every time I saw him or even thought about him, the weight pressed deeper.

At first, it seemed righteous. After all, hypocrisy deserves outrage, doesn’t it? When someone talks about values and family while betraying those very things, isn’t anger the natural response? But after a month of walking around with that stone in my pocket, I realized it was weighing me down more than him. He wasn’t losing sleep over my judgment. I was.

And that’s where “practical faith” entered the picture.

Grace Isn’t Selective

It struck me one day – grace isn’t just for the people we like. It’s not a gift we offer to the people who inspire our respect. That’s easy grace, safe grace. The challenge of faith, and maybe the most practical part of it, is extending grace to the people we don’t respect. The ones who bruise our sense of decency. The ones we’d rather keep in a box labeled “other.”

So I did something that surprised even me: I shook his hand. I prayed for him. Not because he deserved it, and not because it excused what he had done, but because I didn’t want to keep carrying that stone. Forgiveness wasn’t for his benefit – it was for mine.

The Missing Piece: Othering

That was when I realized there’s a missing piece in how we often think about faith. Too often, it becomes an exercise in “othering” – deciding who is in and who is out, who counts as a person of worth and who can be safely dismissed. It’s a subtle form of moral bookkeeping: your faith isn’t the right kind, your morals aren’t as strong, your work ethic doesn’t measure up.

But when I look at the example of Jesus, that isn’t what I see. He didn’t seem interested in shoving people into boxes of “us” and “them.” Instead, he ate with tax collectors, spoke to women society dismissed, touched the sick, and told stories where the supposed outsider turned out to be the hero. He wasn’t soft on wrongdoing – he challenged it directly – but he didn’t dehumanize people for it. He didn’t other them.

That’s what makes faith practical rather than abstract. It’s the decision to treat someone with dignity even when you disapprove of their choices. It’s the courage to recognize that the line between “their flaws” and “my flaws” isn’t all that thick. Their weaknesses may just be more visible.

Freedom in Forgiveness

When I finally extended grace, it wasn’t about approval. It was about freedom. Anger keeps you tethered to someone else’s behavior. Forgiveness, on the other hand, cuts that cord. You can’t always change what someone does, but you can decide whether or not to let it live rent-free inside you.

Shaking his hand didn’t make us friends. It didn’t change my opinion of his behavior. But it did change me. It lightened the load, reminded me that practical faith isn’t about winning a moral argument – it’s about living in a way that doesn’t let bitterness harden your heart.

For Writers: Othering as a Character Lens

For those who write fiction, this tension is fertile ground. Characters come alive when they’re forced to confront people they don’t approve of. Ask yourself:

• Who is your protagonist othering? Maybe it’s the rival, the hypocrite, the shallow colleague. How does that othering shape their own heart?

• Can they learn to extend grace? A character who slowly realizes that compassion isn’t reserved for the likable will come out richer, deeper, more relatable.

• Or is your antagonist the one who never learns this lesson? Perhaps their downfall is tied to their inability to see others as fully human. Their rigidity becomes their weakness.

Stories that explore this move us because they mirror our own lives. We’ve all carried that stone in our pocket. We’ve all felt the weight of anger toward someone who doesn’t “deserve” forgiveness. But a character who finds freedom in grace – without excusing the wrong – gives us a glimpse of what practical faith can look like.

And maybe, in seeing it on the page, we can live it out ourselves.

The Snark