The Jericho Road in SC: But for the grace of God go I

Beneath the phrase is an assumption that poverty reflects something about a person’s willingness to work, and perhaps even something about their character. The neighbor facing eviction, the mother at the food pantry, or the man sleeping beneath the overpass are not victims of circumstance. In this telling, they are simply living with the consequences of their own choices.

Our brains crave order and coherence. Something is right or wrong, fair or unfair, people are deserving or undeserving.

This “just world hypothesis” reassures us that if we work hard, make good choices, and follow the rules, our lives will turn out well.

The more people I meet and the more experiences I have, the harder it becomes to believe that success and stability are simply rewards for good choices.

This is not to dismiss that choices matter. Of course they do. But so do the circumstances in which those choices are made.

Some of us grew up in stable homes free of violence, attended good schools, lived with financial security, and benefited from strong social networks. Others experienced trauma, lived with poverty, experienced housing instability, attended underfunded schools, and grew up in communities where opportunities were scarce or nonexistent.

Advantages compound and so do disadvantages. The gap between people is rarely the result of one decision.

We know this: good people suffer all the time. For far too many of our neighbors, the line between stability and crisis is one missed paycheck, one broken-down car, one rent increase.

We even have a name for many of these families: ALICE, an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.

According to United for ALICE, a family of four in South Carolina needed roughly $77,000 a year in 2024 just to cover basic household expenses. Yet many of the jobs that support our communities, such as childcare workers, home health aides, retail employees, and food-service staff, pay far less than that.

Sometimes earning more does not mean having more. As a low-income parent’s earnings rise, government help through Medicaid, the Women Infants and Children Nutrition Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps), housing assistance, and childcare assistance may shrink or disappear at different income levels.

A small raise can actually leave a family no better off, and sometimes worse off, than before. Turning down a raise or additional hours may look irrational from the outside. From the inside, it can be a careful calculation about how to keep the rent paid, the children fed, and the family insured.

These stories matter because they shape how we see our neighbors. They determine whether we approach someone with curiosity or condemnation, compassion or judgment.

Jesus repeatedly challenged this instinct to judge. He warned people to remove the plank from their own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else’s. When a crowd gathered to stone

a woman caught in adultery, he asked which of them was without sin. One by one, they walked away.

I keep picking up my stone. We all do.

When someone we love loses a job, makes a poor financial decision, or struggles to keep life together, we know the context. We know the divorce, the illness, the grief, the addiction, the hard season they have been carrying. We extend grace because we know the whole story.

When we encounter someone outside our circle, we often fill in the missing pieces with assumptions instead.

“There, but for the grace of God go I” is another saying I have heard so often that I rarely stopped to think about what it meant. To me, it is not an expression of pity. It is a recognition that the

distance between my life and another person’s may be far smaller, and far less earned, than I would like to believe.

Grace, however, cannot end with recognition. Recognition must lead to responsibility, to change.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that it was not enough to help the wounded traveler along the Jericho Road. Eventually, he argued, “the whole Jericho Road must be transformed.”

That statement has stayed with me.

Right now, all across South Carolina, roads and bridges are under construction. Traffic slows.

Detours frustrate us. Yet we endure the inconvenience because we understand that infrastructure cannot be repaired without disrupting what already exists.

The same is true of our communities.

The question is not only whether we will stop for our neighbor when she is suffering beside the road. It is whether we love her enough to help make the road safer.