The Stories We Tell Ourselves in Times of Tragedy

On September 10, 2025, the floor was pulled out from beneath us. Charlie Kirk — conservative activist, father of two, a public figure many admired and many criticized — was speaking at Utah Valley University when he was struck by a sniper’s bullet. Authorities say the shot came from a rooftop roughly 200 yards away. A bolt-action rifle was recovered. This was no quiet crime; the act was deliberate, public, and symbolic.

That same day, in Colorado, a student opened fire at Evergreen High School, critically wounding two classmates before turning the gun on himself. One act was overtly political, the other seemingly personal, but both remind us of the fragility of life and the way violence echoes outward into communities.

What I’ve noticed in the aftermath is not only grief, but polarization. Voices rise quickly and sharply: some lamenting that political violence has no place in a civil society, others warning that dehumanizing rhetoric inevitably provokes bloodshed. Some gloating that Charlie’s voice is gone, others calling for retaliation against “the enemy.” Tragedy has a way of pulling the surface veneer off our civility and revealing the stories we live by underneath.

The Stories That Surface

Our reactions always tell on us. They show what we truly value. For some, the story is one of civility: that disagreement should never cost a life. For others, the story is moral clarity: that evil is real and rhetoric has consequences. Still others cling to a justice-as-retribution story: good can only flourish if harmful voices are removed. And for many, the story is one of confrontation: when attacked, stand strong against your enemy.

None of these reactions are simply “bad” or “good.” They are deeply human ways of making sense of chaos. But they reveal the value systems we hold, and the tension comes when those systems clash. What one person sees as righteous truth, another sees as cruelty. What one names as compassion, another calls weakness. What one treasures as flourishing, another condemns as compromise.

Conservatism and Liberalism, Painted Generously

In broad strokes, we can see these instincts in two familiar postures. Conservatism rests on the conviction that truth exists — not as something we invent, but as something revealed, rooted in God’s design, written into the fabric of reality. Its great gift is stability: the reminder that flourishing cannot come from chasing every passing breeze, but from aligning ourselves with enduring principles. Facts don’t care about your feelings is a way of saying truth stands independent of human whim. At its best, conservatism is fidelity — holding fast to roots that nourish us.

Liberalism, by contrast, is less about roots and more about horizons. It has faith in possibility. It believes truth is not only what has been handed down but also what is yet to be discovered. Its great gift is compassion and imagination: the willingness to meet people where they are, to dream of futures not yet lived. At its best, liberalism is hospitality — opening the table to those once excluded and imagining new ways of being human together.

These two views often clash. One emphasizes principles, the other compassion. One insists on fidelity to what is, the other presses toward what could be. And in a world that thinks in binaries, we are told we must choose.

The Middle Way

But there is a deeper lens — what I’ll call the middle way. This isn’t a bland compromise between poles, but a recognition that truth and compassion are not enemies. They are interwoven threads. Principles without mercy harden into cruelty; compassion without principle dissolves into sentimentality. The middle way is the hard, often fragile work of holding both — roots and horizons, fidelity and imagination, truth and flourishing.

The Kingdoms We Imagine

Every ideology reaches toward a vision of heaven — a society set right, a community without fracture. And we tend to seek this in two ways: by dividing or by unifying.

The dividing way sorts the world into good and evil. In this vision, heaven is the gated home of the righteous, while hell is the exile of the other. Justice comes by casting out. The tension is eased because evil has been eliminated.

The unifying way tells a different story. Evil is not merely cast away but redeemed, integrated. Differences are not erased but reconciled. Even the enemy is invited, not because harm is ignored, but because love believes in a wholeness wider than exclusion. This way eases the tension not by eliminating the other but by reconciling with them, making peace within difference.

Both paths claim to vanquish evil. The difference is how big and diverse heaven’s table becomes.

The Stories We Live

C. S. Lewis once wrote in The Great Divorce:

“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory … the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”

Lewis reminds us that the story we choose doesn’t just shape our future — it reinterprets our past. Heaven or hell isn’t simply a destination but a way of seeing, a lens that reaches backward and colors everything.

In that light, the stakes feel higher. It is not only what kind of society we want to become, but what kind of story we want our lives to tell — what sort of lens we want cast over all we have been.

Our Impact

It is impossible to live a life that does not ripple outward into culture. Silence shapes as much as speech. Reaction shapes as much as reflection. The choice is not whether we impact the story, but how. Do we do so unconsciously, driven by raw emotion? Or do we act soberly, carefully, intentionally — telling a story that aligns with both truth and love?

The invitation is not to resolve the tension once and for all. That’s beyond us. The invitation is to choose, in this moment, which story we water: one of division and exclusion, or one of reconciliation and flourishing. Because in the end, as Lewis warned, we will look back and discover that our whole life has been moving toward heaven or toward hell — depending on the story we chose to live.

An Admonition and a Blessing

As we sit with these tragedies, and with the polarization they stir, I think of the words of Jesus:

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

And from the East, the teaching of Lao Tzu:

“The wise man does not display himself, therefore he shines. He does not assert himself, therefore he is distinguished. He does not boast, therefore he has merit. He does not pride himself, therefore he endures.” (Tao Te Ching)

Both voices, though from different worlds, point to the same truth: that our lives are bound up with one another. What affects one of us affects all of us. To hate, to gloat, to divide — these are not private acts but threads that unravel the whole fabric. To love, to forgive, to reconcile — these are seeds that strengthen the tapestry for everyone.

So let us not hand the pen of our story to fear or anger, for they will always tempt us but cannot be trusted to write our lives. Instead, may we carry wisdom in the mind and love in the heart, letting truth be tender and compassion be strong. And as we walk through these weeks and months ahead, may the story we live bend us — and perhaps even our world — toward heaven.

Darkness turns into light one candle at a time.