Although no one marched through my sleepy Maine town last weekend, carrying torches and hate, I recoiled as I witnessed the images broadcast from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. One photo, captured by resident Jill Mumie, shows a black police officer, head bowed and hands clasped, standing in front of a barricade as Klansmen wave a Confederate flat and raise their hands in a Nazi salute behind him.

How do we respond to such evil?

Like those who ignore or propagate it? Like the Virginia governor who told the protesters, “Go home. You are not wanted.” Or like the Gospel, which says that God wants all people everywhere to turn away from hate and wickedness and to embrace his love and righteousness?

No sin too ugly.

No scar too deep.

For those who wreak violence and break the law, there are the courts. Thank God we live in a country that condemns bigotry and murder and upholds the rights of all citizens to live in peace and pursue their purpose. And yet, how radically short we fall when it comes to providing real-life opportunities, protection, and justice for our most vulnerable, including people of color. How lacking are our hearts in love.

And so how should we respond when a young woman’s life is cut short by a car driven into a crowd? How to respond when fists pummel the peacemakers? And hate parades through our streets?

When I was growing up on our Oregon farm, my mom taught me a song, based on the apostle John’s words in I John 4:7 (NASB). “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God for God is love. Beloved, let us love one another.”

Yet it is so much easier to say than do. So much easier to condemn the actions of those who carry their hate with torches and fists than to confront the sin in myself. The bitter places. The unforgiving places. The places where I want what I want no matter who I hurt.

Yet, this is exactly what the Gospel calls us to do. To examine ourselves. To think of others as better than ourselves. To walk “with humility and gentleness, with patience, showing forbearance to one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” (Ephesians 4:1-2).

This week another picture flashed across my computer screen, this one of the gray-haired apologist, Ravi Zacharias, standing among children in the Essian Camp in Duhok, Iraq, where 15,000 Yazidis are living in tents as internally displaced people after fleeing persecution and slaughter. A welcome in the wilderness. Provision in place of scarcity. Salvation from death.

This is what the Gospel looks like.

Can we share a little of that here?

Meadow Rue Merrill, the author of Redeeming Ruth: Everything Life Takes, Love Restores, writes for children and adults from a little house in the big woods of midcoast Maine. Connect at www.meadowrue.com