I live in a neighborhood that seems to be the proselytism hub of Los Angeles. Let me describe why.

Recently, I was doing a quick run around my block when a woman jumped out of a corner, scaring me out of my skin. I skidded to such a sudden stop that my knee made a resentful “pop!” sound. The Hispanic-looking, guava-shaped woman, who had a long jet-black braid that swung near her hips, thrust a pamphlet at me and said, “Jesús te ama!” I refused the pamphlet, and though I smiled at her, frankly I was a little annoyed.

Life is full of semi-miracles: Let us rejoice and be glad.

If you’ve ever sat in a markup session where senators edit prospective federal laws, you’re not surprised that most legislation is messy sausage-making.

If you’ve ever visited a Hollywood set and seen how complicated the filmmaking process is, you’re not surprised that most movies flop.

Sometimes the work of a reporter feels like something akin to an iceberg. I don’t mean work that’s cold, isolated, and potentially destructive, though journalism apart from heart and humility can become just those things. 

In 2006 I wrote a column on forgiveness and why it’s the hardest thing we ever do, accounting for why we hardly do it.

Recent currents in American life have shifted my focus to that correlative activity to forgiving: apologizing. Apologizing is surely the runner-up for the most difficult of human activities, and I would venture this reason: Your problem in forgiving is my problem in apologizing.

I was at a homeless shelter in San Diego, trailing a gruff nonprofit CEO around, when I met Liz, a 24-year-old woman with ashy blond hair and a bright smile.

For more than seven months, Liz had been living in a tent in one of the roughest parts of town due to some mental health issues. Liz may have been sleeping on the concrete pavement and gotten her cell phone, handbags, and clothes stolen, but it seemed nobody had been able to steal her confidence in her God-given beauty.

“You want to see something beautiful?” she asked.

The first time I met John, he did not care for God. “Where is God?” he cried, looking up into the smog-washed Los Angeles night sky. “Where is He in all this chaos?”

His life, he knew, was not an upstanding one, even though he had once donned a blue-and-white sailor suit to sing in his church’s boys’ choir. Today, at age 61, John is homeless, pickled with decades of alcoholism, and alternating between anger and apathy toward God. He wonders how, if there truly is a God, He could sit back and watch all the devastation unfolding in the world He created.

Many years ago, I attended two funerals within 10 months, both for young men I didn’t know. I went for their mothers’ sakes. One was a suicide, and the pastor did his best to hang his eulogy on the scattered pegs of hope the boy left behind. By the grace of God, there were some. The other was a motorcycle accident.

This young man—I’ll call him Jason—was not reckless or negligent. According to his obituary, the truck he ran into “failed to yield.”