“I have no idea what kind of man he is. All I know is that I was blind and now I can see for the first time in my life.”
— John 9:25 TPT

Ten minutes into our drive and Gloria asked it from the passenger seat. We were on the road, I-55, flat, dull, and familiar like your childhood home. She said it with conviction and confidence, the way people say things they’ve been processing for years.
“Why should I follow the rules when those who have more than me — rich folks — don’t?”
I was quiet. Truth be told, I didn’t have a quick answer. I’m not sure she needed one.
It’s a fair question. Maybe the fairest one anyone riding to Gibson has asked me. She wasn’t being cynical for the fun of it. She was describing something she’d witnessed with her own eyes, and she wanted to know what I was going to do with it.
The blind man in John 9 had a simpler version of the same problem. The religious leaders kept asking him to explain Jesus — who he was, what he was, whether he was a sinner. The healed man finally ran out of patience. I have no idea what kind of man he is. He wasn’t ignoring their question. He was being honest with them. He had one piece of evidence, and he offered it plainly: I was blind. Now I see. Make of that what you will.
Gloria wasn’t asking for a theology lesson either. She was asking whether any of it was real. Whether the rules mean anything. Whether goodness has a point when the people writing the rules aren’t living by them.
The honest answer is: it doesn’t. Not by itself. Not as a civic project or a social contract. Rules without something underneath them are just whoever’s loudest wins. And she’d seen enough of that to know it.
“I’m not pretending it’s easy,” I told her. “But I believe there’s something underneath.”
The emptiness most of us carry around — the low hum of not-enough that no amount of speed or noise or scrolling quite fills — that’s not random. It’s a shape. And shapes like that usually mean something was supposed to go there.
For me, that something is Jesus. Not as a political position or a bumper sticker. As the only explanation I’ve found for why loving your neighbor makes any sense at all when your neighbor is cutting you off in traffic and stealing your place in line and deciding their time matters more than yours.
The blind man didn’t understand the mechanism. He couldn’t explain the theology. He just knew what he’d been before and what he was now, and he stood in that difference and said so.
That’s all any of us can really do. Stand in the difference. Point to it. Tell the person in the passenger seat: I don’t have the whole answer. But I know what I’ve seen.
And what I’ve seen tells me it’s worth it. Worth being kind, especially when no one’s watching. Worth following the rules. Worth asking, every morning, what it would look like to love the person directly in front of me — even when that person thinks the whole thing is pointless.
Especially then.