I didn’t learn pure religion in a church building.
I learned it beside a set of train tracks where men and women tried to survive in cardboard shelters while the world sped past them without noticing.
My wife and I had joined our friend Denise to hand out MREs—military “Meals, Ready to Eat,” the only kind of food that survives life in a cardboard box when cash almost always turns into drugs. I thought I understood what we were walking into. I didn’t.
The cold that day cut straight through us. My wife was shivering, and before I could reach for my jacket, a homeless man stepped toward her. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t weigh his options. He didn’t consider what he’d be left with. He simply took off his coat—thin, dirty, full of a life lived hard—and wrapped it around her shoulders.
My wife’s eyes softened.
Denise’s eyes widened.
She didn’t say a word, but her face said everything:
“Oh dear God, you have no idea where that coat has been.”
It wasn’t judgment.
It was experience—years of watching addiction devour people from the inside.
Her caution was born from heartbreak.
My wife’s gratitude was born from innocence.
And I just stood there caught between two versions of compassion:
one that calculates risk,
and one that doesn’t stop to do the math.
That man, half-starved and trembling, gave more in that moment than most churches give in a year. He didn’t protect himself. He didn’t guard what little he had. And in his emaciated state, he handed her a coat he couldn’t afford to be without—not even for a moment.
And the Spirit whispered,
“That is pure religion.”
Not explained.
Not preached.
Not theorized.
Given.
Denise cared about these people deeply. She had buried more than she could count. But she also carried scars of her own past. In her office, newspaper clippings about her ministry were pinned high on the wall—placed to be seen. Not tucked away. Not humbled. Displayed.
And I understood it.
When you’ve lived most of your life unseen—or seen for all the wrong reasons—
you cling to the moments someone finally notices the good in you.
Compassion and insecurity can live in the same heart.
God was showing me that too.
Later, after leaving one of the encampments, we stopped for gas. Denise went inside, and as I was fueling up, a man—clearly homeless—approached me with a story about being far from home, missing his wallet, and needing money to replace a broken windshield wiper. It was a terrible lie, told poorly. I knew it.
But he also looked desperate.
So I handed him a twenty.
He and the woman with him hurried away, and just then Denise burst out of the store with fire in her eyes.
“Do you know what you just did?” she said.
I thought she was coming to defend me.
I said, “It’s okay. I know he was conning me.”
But she wasn’t relieved.
She was furious.
“You don’t give addicts money! Ever! He’s going to buy drugs! That twenty could kill him!”
I didn’t feel offended. Honestly, I felt sad.
I could see what her fear was shaped by—years of watching people she cared about die after taking one too many hits.
But I also knew something she didn’t:
fear makes rules;
the Spirit makes discernment.
I told her, “Maybe so. But if I hadn’t given him the money, he might’ve mugged someone, robbed the station, pimped out his girlfriend, or done something even worse. At least this way he didn’t have to harm anyone to survive the day.”
She didn’t concede.
She doubled down.
The Spirit didn’t.
He showed me that pure religion is not about removing risk; it’s about removing self.
You can’t love people from a distance and call it holiness.
You can’t insulate yourself from their mess and call it wisdom.
You can’t demand guarantees before showing mercy.
James wasn’t giving the church a ministry model when he said:
“Pure religion… is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction
and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” (James 1:27)
He was describing the life of Christ—
a life that moves toward pain,
into need,
across boundaries that fear builds.
Pure religion doesn’t wait until you understand people.
It doesn’t hold out until you’re sure the story is true.
It doesn’t calculate whether the person deserves help.
Pure religion sees Christ in the hungry man lying.
In the woman shivering beside him.
In the addict who has relapsed again.
In the man who hands his only coat to a stranger.
It doesn’t guarantee safety.
It guarantees presence.
That day God taught me something Denise, for all her compassion, couldn’t teach me:
I am not responsible for ensuring people use my kindness correctly.
I’m responsible for obeying the Spirit when He nudges me to give it.
Pure religion isn’t clean.
It isn’t efficient.
It isn’t safe.
It’s Christ—
moving through His people,
meeting others in their need,
and stripping away the part of us that still wants to control the story.
And sometimes it starts with a coat.
Sometimes with a twenty-dollar bill.
Sometimes with a rebuke that reveals more about someone’s wounds than their wisdom.
But always, always,
it begins when the new man answers
and the old man steps aside.
And as I listened back later, trying to fix the audio recording of this reflection that wouldn’t quite cooperate, something else surfaced—something the Spirit wanted me to see.
Denise calculated risk because she had watched too many people die. But Jesus never let risk decide who He touched. He laid His hands on the unclean—the contagious, the feared, the ones everyone else backed away from. Not because nothing could happen to Him, but because love mattered more than caution.
And the saints who follow Him—missionaries, nurses, servants in forgotten places—they don’t move toward danger because they seek it. They move because the Spirit sends them, and the Spirit keeps them, and if they die, they die serving the other guy. They lay down their prerogative, their safety buffer, even their lives, because greater love has no man than this.
I’m not talking about recklessness dressed up as faith. I’m talking about the kind of obedience that trusts the Spirit to guide us—to or away from harm—and trusts Christ with the outcome. Because pure religion is not the absence of danger.
It is the presence of Christ in the middle of it.