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(OPINION) In a recent Washington Post story, there’s a photo of an attractive, athletic-looking young woman who stands smiling beside an attractive young man.

She’s wearing a tiara and holding flowers and what might be a scepter. Across her chest hangs a blue sash that says “Homecoming Queen.” The young man’s sash declares him the homecoming king.

They are college royalty, the queen and king of Midway University in Kentucky.

If you knew nothing about the woman, who’s the subject of a Post profile, you might imagine she’s enjoyed every advantage — she’s pretty, young, White, popular. You might envy her. If you’re of a certain turn of mind, you might even resent her.

And you’d be wrong.

The woman is Hadley Duvall, 21, who became famous during the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial race after she was featured in an ad in favor of legalized abortion for rape and incest survivors. The ad was viewed online several million times. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear gave her partial credit for his reelection.

As the Post story tells it, “She’d been raped throughout childhood by her stepfather, who pleaded guilty to rape, sodomy and sexual abuse, and is now serving 20 years in prison. He started sexually abusing her when she was 5 years old, according to police reports — at first convincing her that his behavior was normal, then holding her down when she finally realized it was not.”

At 12, she discovered she was pregnant.

Duvall’s early life certainly wasn’t of the silver-spoon variety. It’s hard to imagine many travails worse than what she’s endured.

But you likely wouldn’t guess any of that if it weren’t for the famous ad — if, say, you simply ran into her as a stranger at the mall.

A first responder once told me about a car wreck he’d worked. When he arrived, he found an injured woman. She was beautiful, he said, and driving a luxury vehicle.

He was so repulsed he could hardly bring himself to help her. He imagined how easy her life was, how many unearned advantages she’d enjoyed. He thought she needed to suffer a bit to set the cosmic justice scales aright. He did his job anyway — but it was a challenge.

At the time I heard his story, I’d been counseling a woman who fit that general description. She was beautiful, too, and stylishly groomed.

Turned out she’d been through a bunch of way worse things than I’d ever been through, and I’ve seen my share of grit. She was fighting every day just to find basic emotional health.

I tried to tell the first responder, as kindly as I could, that you can’t see the battles people have endured by looking at outward appearances. You never know what’s lying beneath the skin. You don’t know the demons that attack them when they’re lying awake in the dark.

That’s the thing. You just don’t ever know. You don’t know why they are whatever they are, or why they aren’t who you wish they were.

Even when you live under the same roof with somebody, you don’t know. I once heard an 80-year-old blurt out a secret so devastating it would make you weep, a thing he’d held inside since his youth but couldn’t hold in anymore. Even his closest kin didn’t know.

We should give everybody the benefit of the doubt until all the facts are in. And then, when the facts are in, even if the facts are damning, we should offer some benefit of the doubt anyhow.

No one acts in a vacuum. People are who they are and do what they do for reasons, even if they themselves don’t always understand those reasons.

Clearly, Hadley Duvall deserves enormous compassion. That woman in the wrecked car deserved compassion. So did my friend with coiffed hair and designer purses. So do I. So do you.

But so did the first responder who didn’t want to help the injured woman. He’d probably exhausted all his reserves of compassion by crawling into bloody mangled cars day after day until he had nothing left to spare.

Far thornier is the case of Duvall’s stepfather. It’s hard to find sympathy for anyone who would do such violence to a child. I’m not remotely suggesting he shouldn’t be in prison. Yet, who knows what violence may have been done to him in his past? Perhaps there’s a sliver of compassion to be found there, I don’t know. If we can’t find it, maybe God can.

Certainly justice matters in this world. Absolutely it does. Sometimes punishment is necessary.

But as we journey across this earth, compassion ought to be our default inclination. Compassion toward everyone, or nearly everyone. All the time. Beginning right now.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.