The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week. For some parents, that might mean running out to the store for a few token gifts for their children’s teachers, maybe picking up a gift card or writing a little note of thanks. For other parents, it may be a week they are unaware of or simply choose not to respond to. For me, it’s sharing this piece in the hopes that it reminds everyone who cares for the welfare of...

Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman from Rochester, Minnesota, was caught on camera in a local park playground using the N-word toward a 5-year-old Black autistic boy who she claimed had taken her diaper bag. In the video, as she is confronted by the man recording the video, Hendrix throws up a defiant middle finger and joyfully doubles down with a flurry of repetitions of the racist epithet, all while...

Fascism is here. At this point, it’s too late to prevent its arrival, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a great deal you and I can do to slow its spread, dilute its power, and derail its mission. Here are a few suggestions on reaffirming your agency and flipping off the fascists. 1) Practice empathy loudly . With a President whose tenure has been marked by such malice and in an Administration so f...

It's time to pay up, Trumpers. The deferred invoice for collectively selling your souls is here. It's time to pay for every incendiary campaign boast you cheered,every baseless diatribe you vigorously applauded,every nonsensical middle-of-the-night tweet you boosted,every dehumanizing stereotype and slur you shared,every callous rally insult you passionately amen-ed. It’s time to pay for every den...

I came across a social media post this morning from a former church friend. He was (as usual) carrying on about the LGBTQ community, arguing with folks while sharing Scripture excerpts in an attempt to bolster his position. His lengthy responses feigned some objective position and detached righteousness, but they reeked of prejudice and privilege. Worse, they marked yet another day where his relig...

I’d just hopped into a cab in Toronto, on my way to the airport after a weekend speaking engagement. My driver's name was Mohammed, a middle-aged man born in Afghanistan, who earned his PhD and moved here in his twenties. We talked about the weather, about my work, about our children, and about family car trips to Disney World. Then, we started talking about America. As we got closer to the airpor...

America is tragically deceptive right now. You can go out today in your local community, and everything looks perfectly normal: the sun is shining, pickleball courts are packed, people are out on restaurant patios having lunch, and kids are playing in elementary school playgrounds. It doesn’t look like a fascist dictatorship, it doesn’t feel like a failing democracy, which is why we’re in such tro...

Trump Voters, Pardon me for interrupting America’s Greatness Celebration, but I was thinking about you today. I really have to wonder what story you’re telling yourself after 100 days of this person in power: The Stock Market is in a free fall comparable only to the Great Depression. Your retirement portfolio is surely circling the drain. We’re in a fruitless, completely unnecessary trade war with...

Welcome to another day. You probably didn't give much thought to the fact that you're here, that you woke up at all, other than to lament the conditions you woke up in. You likely haven't stopped to breathe deeply and fully, to feel the air expand your chest, to let it fall slowly as the air departs on your instruction. You probably haven't taken a second to realize that you're alive. There's a go...

I owe Canada an apology. Like millions of other Americans, over the past few hours, I’ve been guilty of sarcastically giving Donald Trump credit for “keeping Canada great,” in the wake of Mark Carney and the Liberal Party’s unthinkable comeback, after being down by double digits just a couple of months ago. And yes, it is true that Trump’s completely asinine and unnecessary trade wars, his nonsens...

It’s a really poor decision to put any human being on a pedestal, to place them in an elevated position simply because of their ability to write a song or light up a stage—or break thousands of tackles on the way to one of the greatest running back seasons in your favorite team’s history. The pitfalls, of course, are that these people, being flawed and failing human beings, will invariably show ho...

America’s been in the news a lot lately. Maybe you’ve seen things. Word on the street is that her best days are well behind her, that she’s clearly peaked, and that her demise is coming swiftly and decisively. They’re saying that the slide into the abyss is inexorable now. They’re saying her epitaph has already been written, and if we can get out, we should. The question is: are they right? (Even...

"We don't talk anymore. My mother is here but gone." This simple confession, made to me yesterday by a 55-year-old mother of three from Wisconsin about her estranged mother, is one I hear or read dozens of times a day in some form or another, doing the work I do. In the hundreds of conversations I have with people each week while leading them through the minefields of relational turbulence, one pe...

Today, a friend I hadn’t seen in a while sent me a text saying, “I miss you, John!” Immediately, I thought to myself, “Me too!” Like many truthful things, the reply arrived housed in humor but left a terrible lingering aftertaste of regret. I was joking, but I wasn’t kidding. I wonder if that resonates with you: the grief of remembering the person you used to be before this sickening season began;...

Pope Francis had barely been dead for twelve hours when Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media for a bizarre celebration of his passing. Alleging some asinine insider info on the will and the work of God, she posted: Now, in any normal period in America’s history, under any normal Administration, and from any other normal American politician, this kind of sickening d...

Dear Hateful White Americans, For a long time, I misunderstood my feelings toward you. You would pop up on my social media feed, drive past me in traffic, say something over Thanksgiving dinner, or I'd overhear you at a restaurant, and what seemed like rage would rise quickly within me. I thought it was abject hatred. Recently, I realized that I don't hate you—I feel sorry for you. I grieve over w...

Decent people need to face a really painful truth at this point: Far too many of our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and classmates are fully complicit in this carnage. His absolute disregard for the Constitution, throwing our nation into perpetual chaos;his rejection of the rule of Law, stripping elemental rights from tens of millions of Americans;his unthinkable, unspeakable trea...

To those who believe I’m too loud, too opinionated, too political—I get it. Growing up, I was taught to avoid talking about politics and religion in mixed company (whatever that was). In my younger days, I made it a point never to vilify groups en masse or to demonize individuals in leadership outright whenever speaking about the events of the day. Even in the most challenging of times, I always l...

As a former pastor of over two decades, I could seriously throw up right now. The Trump Administration wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father of four, to a brutal prison in El Salvador and it is defiantly refusing to honor a SCOTUS ruling ordering him to be returned to his family. A flesh-and-blood human being made in the image of God (in Christian langauge) is knowingly being denied his...

As Christianity’s Holy Week begins marking the final week of Jesus’ life as presented in the Bible, the State Department under Marco Rubio recently instructed all of its employees to report coworkers for ”anti-Christian bias.” The directive supports an Executive Order signed by Donald Trump in February, proposing to root out Federal employees who oppose Christianity—and it is irony of Biblical pro...

People often say God moves in mysterious ways. I won't argue with them. I was a local church pastor for more than two decades. During the 2016 presidential campaign, as I started to ask more questions and as I became more outspoken against the approaching marriage of Church and State I was witnessing, I experienced a massive personal exodus. I lost hundreds, perhaps thousands of former church frie...

My family and I had barely been in our Lisbon Uber for ninety seconds when our gregarious driver Nuno, recognizing our accents asked, “So… are you pro-Trump or anti-Trump?” For a split-second I froze, as two alternate scenarios played out in my head: Were we about to be warmly embraced by a kindred spirit from an ocean away, or find ourselves in the back of a Portuguese fascist sympathizer’s car p...

This week, I was talking with a Trump supporter who claims to be Christian, and I brought up the inhumanity of indiscriminate I.C.E abductions, baseless mass deportations, and unrepentant abuse of immigrants. He dodged it all by reiterating a recurring MAGA theme guiding his continued support: Providence. "This is God's doing," he said very matter-of-factly. "Trump has been chosen by God." Well, h...

Yesterday, I commented on social media about the unparalleled Stock Market free-fall we’re experiencing due to Donald Trump’s stupefyingly asinine tariff war. I noted the profound economic trauma it is causing the world and hundreds of millions of Americans, and I received a reply from a young mom from Texas with both Jesus and an American flag in her bio, similar to many I’ve gotten recently: Cry...

"I never wished for someone to die before. I've been suicidal many times in my life—but I've never been homicidal." So began the tearful confession of a soft-spoken middle-aged woman who approached me after a speaking event in Lincoln, Nebraska. She paused for a second, exhaled loudly—and then continued, her voice shaking: "I'm ashamed to say that I find myself wishing these terrible people would...