One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...
What does it truly mean to be good? Socrates asked this question, and so did the writer of Proverbs. The ancient Greeks believed the examined life was the only one worth living. The Hebrew Bible implores us to walk humbly, do justly, and love mercy. Jesus said the greatest commandment is love—of God, and of neighbor. Yet despite all these teachings, human beings often seek shortcuts to virtue. In Kenya, where Christian devotion saturates the public and private sphere—where gospel music flows from every matatu, church gatherings abound, and Bibles decorate countless coffee tables—there remains a chasm between belief and moral action. Why does Christianity seem powerless to transform us? We are a nation flooded with religious ritual but starved of ethical reflection. You can go to a church service on Sunday, steal land on Monday, destroy a young woman’s life on Tuesday, and blame it all on the devil by Wednesday. We memorize scripture but forget to live it. We cry during worship son...