The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Mel Robbins’ new book, ‘The Let Them Theory’ is an unqualified smash, and I can understand why. In matters of self-compassion and relationships, it offers wisdom on releasing the desire to change other people and letting go of our concerns regarding others’ perceptions of us so that we can focus on what is within our hands to affect. This is elemental, critical advice for we who are people pleaser...

So, MAGAs are angry at Superman now. Well, more accurately, they’re angry at director and DC Studios head James Gunn for accurately saying of the film’s titular character that he is an “immigrant that came from other places,” and that some may take offense to the film because the film centers on “human kindness.” And, well, the rank-and-file of Trump’s perpetually offended misery movement didn’t n...

How in the hell did we get here? Really. I’m not asking how America elected a convicted felon, or how nearly every Republican in Congress steamrolled one of the most malevolent pieces of legislation in recent history through, or how the Evangelical Church ended up fully making its bed with a political party to disastrous results for both entities. Those things can at least be reasonably explained...

All over America, MAGA Republicans will stream into churches this Sunday. They will do so joyously. They will do so arrogantly. They will do so believing they have won. It be a hollow procession of morally inverted disciples of a felon, who have spent the past week applauding the passing of a simply sickening piece of legislation; one that will result in tens of millions of the poorest and most vu...

F*ck the fireworks and flip the flags. For actual patriotic Americans, this isn’t a party, it’s a funeral. There is nothing to celebrate here. We shouldn't be singing right now; we should be grieving. We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see. We should be mourning over how little of our aspirations of Independence have trickled down to the people in the street...

So, this is what it must have felt like on that glorious but now doomed craft, only two short hours after the iceberg, hidden just beneath the surface, tore violently through its hull: Desperately clinging to a frozen rail, struggling to stand on a badly tilting deck that is becoming more vertical by the second, while all around swirl the sounds of glass shattering, wooden planks splitting, and pe...

I can remember when we had a human president. It was only a few months ago, but it may have been a lifetime. Watching President Biden at the memorial service for Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were murdered in their homes by a Conservative Christian zealot, my heart broke open again at the sight of a leader of empathy performing the greatest act of leadership: b...

Trump Supporter, this isn’t about him. It never was. My sadness has nothing to do with him, despite what you think. I know who he is—and more accurately, I know what he is. From the very beginning, he’s just been a spotlight. He has simply revealed the disfigured ugliness of the place I call home and the people I live alongside—and that is the thing I grieve over. And this is not the mourning over...

Move over, Queer People and Immigrants, Islamophobia is back on the GOP Menu! Over the past couple of years, Republicans have spent so much time in breathless histrionics over supposedly predatory transgender folks lurking in our public bathroom stalls and alleged drug-peddling Mexican gang members picking our strawberries, it’s been easy to forget how prevalent their Islamophobia is and always ha...

Hell hath no fury like religious people getting religion wrong, and what's worse, we usually don't have a clue that we've lost the plot when we have. There are lots of reasons for our blunders of belief: an insular church culture that naturally resists difference, a rigid theology steeped in fear that tends to mark out a hard line between those who are in and those who are out , or plain old-fashi...

The middling fireworks had barely fizzled out in the sky over Trump’s empty, energy-impotent, failed birthday ego event in DC, and you just knew something was coming, you just couldn’t be sure what it was. He was embarrassed, infuriated, and publicly humiliated, and something would need to be manufactured to steal the world’s gaze from the optics of No Kings Day’s glorious, exuberant outpouring an...

Donald Trump bombing Iran without Congressional approval is not shocking. Since January 20th, he has rendered our Constitution virtually irrelevant, ignoring every policy, precedent, and channel designed to prevent a maniacal individual from operating unilaterally and endangering our people. However, his decision to declare war on Iran right now is surprising. He’s currently already at war with th...

To my Transgender friends, I may have the good fortune to know you, but likely, I do not. That means I don’t know your story I can’t imagine how you feel. I can't fathom how difficult this road has been for you: the swirling storm of the questions inside your head, the hidden fears you've had to constantly keep at bay, the incessant worries about the responses of those you love to your full truth,...

My country is hurting. We the people, are hurting. The hurt shows up in so many ways, ways that surprise and distract and confuse us, ways that don't always look like hurt from where we're standing, ways that don't seem like pain from a distance: Quick impatience with strangers in the checkout line. Emotional outbursts at people we love. Venomous, hateful, bitter social media tirades. Polarizing p...

We all have stories we tell ourselves about the kind of people we are, about our values, about our presence here, about our reason for being. But those narratives are often largely subjective: a combination of unrealized aspirations, wishful thinking, and subtle main character energy narcissism that needs to make ourselves the heroes. Eventually, though, who we are is revealed, not in who we imagi...

I’ve read this story before. It doesn't end well. As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I'm quite familiar with the Old Testament narrative: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds. This new American reboot is...

This past weekend, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a diverse and sprawling mass of humanity gathered to protest this authoritarian regime, and the haunting, steadfast words of Solomon Burke’s song ‘None of Us Are Free’ cycled through my head: There are people still in darkness, And they just can't see the light. If you don't say it's wrong, then that says it’s right. We got to try to feel for ea...

I’m OK. That’s how I respond when people ask how I’m doing. But 'OK' is a lie I’ve grown accustomed to telling. I’m not OK. I’m a couple hundred miles from OK, actually. The truth is, on many days, I feel like I’m hanging by the thinnest of threads, barely clinging to sanity, terrifyingly close to slipping into the abyss. On most mornings, I wake after having navigated a litany of stress dreams an...

Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were brutally murdered in their homes early Saturday morning. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also shot and seriously wounded in their homes and are both currently hospitalized. It would soon be revealed that the suspect in these shootings was an anti-abortion, Trump-supporting, evangelical Republican who also had eleven...

Photo by Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com Sometimes you don’t notice attrition when it happens. When you lose elemental parts of you, they don’t all depart at once, and since you’re inside yourself in the daily woundings of this life, you may not feel the thousands of tiny cuts at the time. You may not notice the lifeblood slowly draining from your spirit. In fact, you might believe you’re who y...

“How are you?” I asked my dear friend Julie as she fell into her chair across from me with a loud exhale. “I’m OK,” she replied almost immediately, with a squinting forced smile that I long ago learned meant she wasn’t being completely truthful. “Let’s try this again,” I said, slowing down and looking directly at her. “Really… how are you?”Tears quickly pooled in her eyes, and her voice quivered s...

Dear Friend, Sometimes I wonder if you’re seeing everything I’m seeing, if you still watch the news or hop on social media anymore. Perhaps you checked out somewhere along the way; maybe after the election or the Inauguration, or some heartbreaking atrocity that was the final straw for you, and now you're just not aware of what’s going on. Maybe you’ve retreated into a smaller and more private exi...

Let’s be honest, when it comes to human beings entering this country, Republicans, Evangelicals, and MAGAs don’t give a damn about documentation. It’s all about pigmentation. If all the immigrants were white, the violent and illegal I.C.E. abductions would suddenly cease. Conservative talk shows would magically stop declaring a "national emergency" at our southern border. There would no longer be...

Hey MAGAs, let’s be honest about what’s been happening this week in Los Angeles: this is your fault. This whole crisis exists because on the campaign trail, Trump promised you mass deportations, knowing that would swell your loins and tickle your racist fancies. He ran on a bigot’s fever dream of driving out tens of millions of supposed “illegals,” and that was all you needed to hear. The problem...

Denial is a powerful drug. In the wake of the unthinkable images and footage coming out of California over the weekend, it’s easy to feel insulated from the chaos if we happen to reside somewhere else in the country, as if our geography protects us. Watching heavily-armed troops spraying civilians with rubber bullets and bombing them with tear gas for rightly protesting I.C.E.’s indiscriminate rou...