The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Everyone knows that the sequel is almost always worse than the original. This newly-released s**t show is no exception. Right now, even the most intellectually-sound, emotionally-grounded, spiritually-steadied, and mentally-stable of human beings among us are looking around asking, “What in the hell is happening here, how much worse can it actually get, and how exactly am I going to survive?” And...

I really hate this. I mean, I really didn’t want to be here, to be feeling this, to be writing it, to be saying it. I’ve always believed in meeting people where they are, in trying to understand those who don’t agree with me. As a pastor for decades, I worked to bridge the divides between people, to champion diversity as our highest calling. My first book called A Bigger Table , was centered aroun...

If your eyes are clear and open right now you can see it, can’t you? This is a pivot point moment for us. It is the place we collectively turn toward our best selves or slide into the abyss of the very worst of who we are capable of being. We are now crafting our shared collective legacy in real-time, and the world is watching to see who we will be. Our children are watching, too. These are histor...

(Trigger warning: domestic violence imagery) It's heartbreaking to see someone you love in a toxic relationship: watching them be continually torn down and berated, treated with complete disregard, publicly humiliated over and over again—and knowing that despite how much damage has been inflicted, they will likely stay with their abuser to their own detriment. There is a unique kind of helplessnes...

I used to think I loved America but I didn’t. It turns out, I loved the myth of America. Growing up, I bought into its songs and its anthems and its stirring stories of liberty and opportunity, which I guess was understandable. For a suburban, cisgender, heterosexual male who identified as Christian, these myths were more true for me than most. They were all I'd ever known. That version of America...

I just returned from a few days in Austin, Texas, speaking at a progressive seminary to a diverse audience of ministers, activists, educators, and compassionate human beings. ​With everything happening lately, I was really hesitant to attend for fear that I would simply have my fears and worries reiterated hundreds of times—and that I would leave there more hopeless and deflated than when I began....

Hi JD, I know you claim to be a follower of Jesus. I’ve heard you invoke your Catholic faith often on the campaign trail. You wear your religion openly. Now, let’s set aside the fact that you’re serving underneath a man you yourself not long ago compared to Hitler: a court-adjudicated rapist and 34-count felon indicted several times for high crimes; a man whose racism, misogyny, and immorality are...

So, DEI is the new “woke”: MAGA America’s default boogeyman-du-jour. It’s the latest convenient catch-all for Trump and his party to invoke at every opportunity as the scapegoat for crime, natural disasters, public health emergencies—and apparently, somehow, airplane crashes. And as with every phony threat and manufactured evil spewed into the ether by Republican leaders to manipulate the ignorant...

Something often happens to people exposed to repeated trauma. Gradually, they become conditioned to accept the horrors as commonplace. Time and brutality start to wear down their defenses and sap their emotional resources and they begin learn to live alongside the most malignant sickness as if it were ordinary. Slowly but quite decidedly, they grow numb to the unthinkable cruelty and the sustained...

These are days that test our belief systems. I used to believe that all people were essentially the same; that across the diving lines of politics and religion, and beneath the surface veneer of native language and superficial labels that we were all really fighting for the same things. I spent over two decades as a pastor, ministering under the assumption that we are all in this together, that we...

In the 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters , an embittered painter named Frederick (who is also an Atheist) is lamenting the grave state of the world to his partner, when his anger turns toward Christians, saying, “If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.” That’s about as eloquent and topical a sermon as I can imagine. At this point, I need a barf bag or a...

I know what you're thinking. I know you feel something breaking inside lately; an invisible fracture that only you're fully aware of. I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those things in them and worry you may be overreacting. I know the way you feel internally...

Some things live solely at the expense of others. They voraciously feed off those they attach themselves to; robbing their hosts of their lifeblood, sapping them of their vitality, gradually depleting them until they are a shell of what they'd been before the invasion began. It’s pretty clear right now our nation is sick and rapidly declining. There is little doubt that this President is a planeta...

Sometimes what seems like reality is just volume. The loud people get to write the story that everyone hears, the one they come to believe is the only story. In this way, they get to define what is true for those looking on who may not hear anything else. Right now there is a story being written about Christians in America; a story saturated with cruelty and absent of compassion, and because the a...

These days will kill you if you’re not careful. As we walk headlong into this Category 5 s**t storm that is a second Trump term, one thing is irrefutably clear already: it’s going to be much worse than we thought. In just a few days, even the most pessimistic post-election predictions are proving to have woefully underestimated the scope and the velocity of the carnage to our systems of protection...

To the Ministers in America, I’ve been where you are. For nearly 30 years I sat where you sit. I know the difficulties of the work you do that many people don’t think about: the collective expectations of the people you serve, the incredible pressures that come from above you and around you, the number of opinions you have to respectfully sift through—and I know the tumult that often creates withi...

Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s compassionate sermon at the National Prayer Service in DC perfectly exposed MAGA Christians’ hateful heresy. The immediate flood of vitriol directed at the Bishop by Trump supporters in the wake of her impassioned message directed toward President Trump regarding empathy for the vulnerable isn’t surprising. That’s what happens when these people are faced with the teachin...

This morning was a rude awakening. My eyes opened and my mind quickly began to assemble the first few seconds of my day (making plans, organizing my checklist), when a terrible interruption broke in and I remembered: Yes, that unhinged madman is actually our President again. And yes, he and his sycophantic ghouls really planned a violent insurrection that nearly toppled our Government, simply beca...

To the people I know who voted for him, You know how I feel about him. I’ve never hid my contempt for him, never pulled punches in declaring with great specificity why I have so vehemently opposed him. You’ve seen the precise detail I have gone into over the past decade in inventorying why I have been so steadfast in resisting him and his movement. There’s nothing I could say about him here that y...

For as long as America is remembered on this planet, people will try to understand these days through the distorted lens of time and distance. Authors, sociologists, criminologists, cult experts, political scientists, and brilliant minds in future generations will attempt to explain how tens of millions of once-reasonable, sane, seemingly goodhearted human beings betrayed their love of country, th...

The second inauguration of Donald Trump falling on Martin Luther King Jr. day feels like a sick cosmic joke: a moment so cruel in its irony that it seems as unthinkable as the coming presidency itself. Yet, the occasion, as painful and nauseating as it is, is actually helpful in reminding us of the cavernous distance between the two men, their respective visions of America, and the choice we all h...

“How are you?” I asked my dear friend Julie, as she fell down 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 quive...

I didn’t want to be doing this. Ten years ago, I was a student pastor at a large Suburban North Carolina church. Though I’d been writing a blog for a while, it had been for an audience made up largely of parents of teenagers and youth pastors. I touched on ministry, parenting, religion, grief, the Church-at-large—but rarely on politics, and certainly not politicians by name. Yet, as the 2016 presi...

Let’s be honest here: at a time like this, feeling is hazardous to one's health. A working heart can be a liability in these days because its treasure, its beautiful, sacred tenderness is the very thing that leaves it prone to injury. Every false word, every act of violence, every appearance of injustice strikes another vicious blow to its surface. Like a twisting piñata struck in rapid succession...

Dear Carrie Underwood, I hope this finds you well. I’m writing because I’ve heard you speak eloquently about your Christian faith in the past, watched you perform a song about the beautiful mystery of baptism, often listened to your now-ubiquitous invocation for Jesus to take the wheel : to guide the life you live and to let his will direct your path. I also know that you’ve been a role model for...