Love Without Obligation

Field Notes from the Afterlife is a weekly-ish letter on the stories we tell ourselves, and the strange clarity that comes once the world you trusted falls apart. If something here steadies or stays with you, feel free to reshare it. Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, and helping this space stay alive. You can learn more about me and what I am up to at: www.sarahstiltner.com.

This is Part 3 in a Series. Read Part 1     Read Part 2

I have learned over the years that courage begins with a single honest sentence. Before the 2025 year ended, I began a series in an attempt to look directly at what I once tolerated and called normal, to revisit the warnings and corrections and judgments that shaped me, to face the moments when my own instincts collided with the doctrine I was taught. It is also my attempt at an honest reckoning in the ways I participated in a structure that treated human need as something lower, and the remorse and grief that has followed.

What I am writing now lives somewhere between an unlearning and rebuilding. Somewhere between the painful recognition of how far I had strayed from my own moral compass, and the slow return to a compassion I should never have doubted.

On May 20, 2013, an EF5 tornado tore through Moore, Oklahoma.

We had moved back to the state only weeks earlier, and were now living just 6.5 miles south of the tornado’s path. For many hours that afternoon, we lost contact with my husband, who had been driving directly in the storm’s path. Eight hours passed without word. What I remember most is the sense of suspended time, the way imagination fills the vacuum when there is nothing to do but endure uncertainty.

My husband was fine, but twenty-four people died that day. Seven were children. Two hundred twelve people were injured. A school and a hospital were destroyed. It was utter devastation.

One family we knew lost their home. They were fellow members of the church in Oklahoma City, the local church we were meeting with at the time. They escaped with their lives and almost nothing else. For once, the devastation of the world was not distant or theoretical. It had names. Faces. People we sat beside on Sundays.

Oklahoma News 6

The need was vast and in every direction. Immediate, practical need. And the wider community responded with speed and care. Everyone was looking for ways to help. Some volunteers searched the debris, watching for documents, photographs, and small personal artifacts that could still be salvaged. Online, Facebook groups formed overnight. Strangers posted photos of what they had found, hoping someone would recognize a piece of a former life.

Others worked to reunite lost pets with their families. Shelters opened. Food and water were distributed. Clothing was shared. Hands were everywhere—lifting, sorting, listening. Memorials were held. Funerals were attended. The work was imperfect and improvised and unmistakably human.

All of this was happening around us. All of it was visible.

Loss, when it comes close, refuses abstraction. It interrupts the habits that keep suffering safely elsewhere.

And so, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, the elders of the local church decided we needed to respond to a community crisis.

But we didn’t bring anything that would be considered a “low” human need. No, we had a higher calling.

So we did not bring water. Or food. Or clothing. Or money. Or tools. Or helping hands.

No, the elders thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to preach the “high” gospel—the version we were taught was superior to all others, because it contained the so-called High Peak of the Divine Revelation as revealed by Witness Lee—on the grounds that people in desperate situations are “more open.” Oblivious to the devastation around us, and to the ethical violence of exploiting grief and shock as evangelistic leverage, the members of our local church finally joined the army of volunteers and went into the neighborhoods ourselves.

The houses were not just damaged; they were obliterated. Streets no longer made sense. Familiar landmarks had collapsed into heaps of splintered wood. Cars were twisted into strange obelisks. People stood in open spaces where their homes had been, trying to orient themselves in a landscape that no longer held their lives.

And the only thing we brought with us was the Recovery Version of the Bible, dense with footnotes from Witness Lee’s ministry. That was the offering.

I remember the unreality of it. The smell of destruction still hanging in the air. People standing exposed and exhausted, and us holding Bibles. There was no discussion of coordinating with relief efforts. No plan to help rebuild. No consideration of what people might need to survive the next hour, let alone the next day.

Spiritual need outweighed physical need. Food and water could wait. God’s need could not. The God we preached so loved the world, yet that love stopped short of any real human obligation.

I remember feeling embarrassed and awkward as we walked through the wreckage. And beneath that, a dense, unnameable wrongness. I did not yet have language for it. The system had trained me to override instinct, to distrust my own response, to believe that compassion without doctrine was an inferior form of care.

So I stood there. I participated. I helped hand out nothing but Bibles.

That is the part that remains with me now.

Because when I return to that day, the contrast is unbearable. A community around us doing the slow, tender work of restoration. Strangers helping strangers recover fragments of their lives. And us, offering literature in the middle of devastation, convinced we were giving something better.

This is what it looks like when abstraction outranks bodies. When theology overrides survival. When compassion is so thoroughly spiritualized that it no longer requires action.

I carry remorse for this—a precise grief tied to a particular place and time. I was there. I saw the need. And I did not step out of the role I had been given.

At the time, I would have told you we were serving God. I would have told you we were offering something eternal. I would have told you that physical needs were temporary and spiritual truth was what mattered most.

Now I see what that belief required me to ignore. And who it harmed.