Spiritual Sunday: Beyond the Labels by Jared Harding Wilson

By Jared Harding Wilson

We live in a world obsessed with permanent markers. When someone commits a terrible act—whether they become a thief, a drug dealer, an abusive partner, a sex offender, or even a murderer—society rushes to slap a label on them.

We don’t just say they committed a crime; we define them by it forever.

It is incredibly easy to look at someone else’s worst choices, label them a monster, and feel righteous by comparison. It feels like “doing good” to shun them, cancel them, and cast them out. But there is a massive, uncomfortable difference between condemning a bad person from a safe distance and actually reaching out a hand to lift them up.

When we label someone permanently, we actively preclude the possibility that they can change. We lock them out of a healthy life before they even have a chance to try.

Bars, Barbed Wire, and Recycling

As a country, we spend billions of dollars on metal bars, concrete walls, and barbed wire. We build massive holding cells designed to throw people away. But what if we shifted our focus from throwing people away to “recycling” them? What if we spent those billions on healing, intensive therapy, and treatment?

The reality is that the vast majority of people currently sitting behind bars will eventually rejoin society. They will walk our streets, shop in our grocery stores, and live in our neighborhoods again. If our goal is truly to make the world a safer place, what makes more sense? Shunning and rejecting them—which almost guarantees they will repeat a sad, vicious cycle of crime—or accepting, treating, and including them so they can successfully transition back into community life?

True justice isn’t just about punishment; it has to be about restoration.

The Ultimate Test of Forgiveness

This kind of radical grace sounds nice on paper, but it is agonizingly difficult in practice. Yet, we have seen it happen.

In 2007, a teenage drunk driver crashed into a family car in Utah, instantly killing a pregnant mother and two of her children. The surviving husband and father, Chris Williams, sat in a neck brace on a hospital gurney and asked a question that shocked his friends: “How is the young man that was driving the car?”  

Chris chose to forgive. He actively visited the young man in prison, not to downplay the horrific tragedy, but because he genuinely wanted the teenager to be able to heal and live a good, meaningful life. He chronicled this painful, beautiful journey in his memoir, Let It Go, and the Church captured the essence of his story in a short film titled Forgiveness: My Burden Was Made Light.  

Chris’s story is a modern echo of what Christ taught in the New Testament when He said that whatever we do for the “least of these,” we do for Him (Matthew 25:40). Centuries before that, a king named Benjamin taught his people a parallel truth: when we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God (Mosiah 2:17).

Neither Christ nor King Benjamin put a disclaimer on those verses. They didn’t say “serve the poor, unless they brought it on themselves,” or “visit the imprisoned, unless their crime was too ugly.” Jesus taught: to reject, judge, gossip, shun, and abandon them, is to do the same to Him.

An Unexpected Heaven

A few years ago, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf reminded us of the ultimate makeup of the celestial kingdom:

“Remember, heaven is filled with those who have this in common: They are forgiven. And they forgive.”

I really feel like there will be people who are deeply surprised by who they see in heaven someday. Christ’s Atonement is wide enough to reach into the darkest corners of a prison cell and rebuild a broken soul.

Won’t it be a tragedy if, on that day, some of us refuse to be there simply because someone we labeled as “irredeemable” was forgiven, healed, and made it there too?

It’s easy to talk about grace, but much harder to extend it to the people society has written off. Have you ever seen someone completely turn their life around after being given a second chance?