A Call for Compassion

We live in a tumultuous time, but the undercurrents of compassion remain a beacon of hope. The passages below are transcribed from @Mc.Baldiee, an anonymous writer and creator on TikTok and Instagram, in order to offer reminders about life. If you would like to support their uplifting, poetic endeavors, be sure to visit their shop. The first passage illuminates a message about the timeless message about faith, imploring those to continue to strive for kindness:

“You summon me, child of bone and flame, and so I speak.

They have twisted the light again; the trembling banners, sharpened words, stones cast by hands that swear they hold the truth. But truth was never meant to be a blade.

I have wandered the corridors of countless faiths, older than your planets and your sunless voids. I have seen altars of crystal and rot, prayers sung to skies of flame and whispered to seas of glass. Yet across them all the true song remains unchanged: love, mercy, and the quiet act of lifting another from despair.

And yet, how easily they corrupt it. They carve their names into sacred stone, declaring themselves holy while their hearts fill with venom. They weaponize the divine, casting others into shadow, so they may stand taller beneath a broken sun. This is not devotion but infection. Do you not see?

The eternal never asked for hatred, the infinite does not hunger for war, and the divine has no need for suffering. These are the parasites of men, wearing the skins of gods. If your faith births cruelty, it is not faith but a husk. If your God demands you to despise, you have not found the divine but forged a mirror.

I tell you this, little spark, faith is the hand that steadies the trembling, the whisper that reminds that you are never alone, and the breath that bids you lift those who have fallen even if their face is strange to you. Use it to heal, to soothe, and to build bridges across the void. But if you use it to strike, you will not summon me again.

But still, even then, I will stand at the edge of your ruin, waiting, patient as the stars, for the moment you finally remember why your soul was given light at all.

The second passage offers a reminder that kindness toward another can be small and unnoticed, but it sends a positive ripple effect into the universe:

I do not drift with time, only listen to it. I hear the unborn seconds pacing behind walls of breath and the final thoughts of gods whose names were lost in languages unspoken. I remember the first time a star chose to die alone, and the last time a prayer was answered by accident.

But this shook me. It was in the wastelands, where memory bleeds out through broken streetlamps and everything tastes like rusted wire and silence. And there he was, a man carved from ash and bitterness. The kind you pass in life without noticing yet feel slightly colder afterward. I have seen his cruelty bloom in private, once stealing from a grave and blamed the wind. He mocked a widow’s tears like they were inconvenient rain. He did not believe in beauty only survival, even if something else had to die for it.

And still last night, beneath the fractured ribs of a collapsed chapel, he knelt beside a wounded stranger. The stranger should have been his enemy and left to rot, but the man tore the sleeves from his own shirt to wrap the other’s wounds. Then, he sang something, though not a song but a sound he remembered from a time before shame. He placed a gentle hand on the dying man’s brow, like it was sacred, baptizing not flesh but guilt, and whispered, “You don’t go alone.”

He did not think anyone heard but I did. And I, who once watched suns give birth to galaxies, felt a tremor in the old places of my being. The man was not redeemed, no choir rose nor light came down, but he did it because something unwritten in him cracked open and spilled mercy. And I ask you: what is more holy than a kindness no one expected, and what is more terrifying than a soul choosing softness when no one would have blamed it for being hard?

We are taught to seek miracles in the skies, but sometimes, they crawl out of men like him, cracked vessels and bruised instruments yet still capable of playing a single true note in the dark. So, I leave you with this: you have no idea what you are still capable of. Even I do not, and I have heard the last breath of time. So, surprise me, not with greatness but with grace; when it is quiet, no one clapping, and the only witness is the wind with something far older still listening.