Pastor Gregg’s Weekly Word | January 28, 2026
A Prayer for the Human Heart
Yesterday—January 27—was Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day set aside to remember, to grieve, and to refuse forgetfulness.
Once, I had the opportunity to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I went because I wanted to better understand our Jewish siblings. I left knowing that “understand” might be too small a word for what that experience requires.
It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to walk through those exhibits—the weight of it all. The history of government-sponsored persecution and the murder of six million Jewish people. The stories—the racially motivated hatred, the brutality, the evil. The camps, the mass murder. The suitcases, the shoes of men, women, and children. A boxcar, hairbrushes and hair. The photographs. And the voices.
I remember sitting in a room, listening to oral histories from Holocaust victims and survivors—voices from the past that felt present. It was a gut-punch to the soul. Disturbing. Heartbreaking. Haunting. An opening into a part of the human condition we’d rather not look at too closely.
I remember thinking: How can human beings do this to one another? What moves us toward such cruelty? Where was the pushback—the moral revulsion? What went wrong?
Blaise Pascal once spoke of the misery and grandeur of being human. That phrase has stayed with me. To be human is to live with a sobering truth that somewhere within each of us lies the capacity for both light and darkness. For compassion and cruelty. For sacrificial love and devastating harm. Angel and beast, held together in the same fragile body.
Naming that reality isn’t meant to shame us. It’s meant to humble us.
Spiritual wisdom across traditions agrees on this much: maturity begins when we stop pretending that evil is only “out there,” safely located in other people, other nations, other times. The danger isn’t only forgetting history—it’s believing we’re immune from it. When we acknowledge the paradox we carry within us, we begin to understand why transformation of the human heart isn’t a self-improvement project. It’s grace-dependent work.
Remembering the Holocaust isn’t only about honoring the dead—though it’s certainly that. It’s also an invitation to honesty. To vigilance. To prayer. To the hard and holy work of tending the soul, asking God to help us live into the better angels of our nature—and to resist, in ourselves and in our world, whatever dehumanizes, diminishes, or destroys.
Part of why this has been weighing on me is what we’re seeing in our country right now. As someone who’s just moved back to Houston while my family remains in Minneapolis so our daughter can finish her senior year, my heart is still deeply tied to both places. Watching events unfold—especially in Minnesota and other states—has stirred something in me, and I’m sure for many of you as well. For me, this is about paying attention, asking hard questions of the heart, and refusing to look away when the dignity of people is at risk.
So today, remembering the Holocaust, I find myself praying a simple, honest prayer—not just for the world, but for my own heart. A prayer for humility, clarity, and courage. For the grace to notice when fear hardens into suspicion, when certainty slips into cruelty, when silence becomes complicity.
May remembrance soften us rather than numb us. May it keep us awake to the sacred worth of every human life. And may God help us choose—again and again—to live on the side of love, to speak up when it matters, and to practice a faith that resists dehumanization.
And for those of you who are part of this amazing church family called Asbury, if you’d like to talk further about any of this, I’d welcome that. My door is always open.
Much love,
Pastor Gregg
