The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Surveying my news feed lately, I can't help but think that most people doing the same thing would be hard-pressed not to come away with the conclusion that all Christians are preoccupied with plumbing—both personal and public. God help us, we just cannot stay out of people's bathrooms and bedrooms. Whenever a pastor, church, denomination, or Christian politician makes headlines these days, invaria...

I finally figured out why this is all so frustrating. Now I know why we’re all so exhausted, why many of us can’t sleep at night. In the aftermath of the election, it's clear that Donald Trump didn’t win. In many ways, he is irrelevant to the lion’s share of his supporters. Nothing about him really mattered to them during this campaign: It didn’t matter that he was nearly devoid of substantive pol...

For many people, the holidays are a time for recognizing our profound fullness : of purposefully dwelling on the abundant overflow we find ourselves in and being grateful for it. For many, our houses and our bellies bulge to capacity and we gleefully overindulge in food and friends and laughter. We fill ourselves to bursting with all the things, the people, and the stuff that make life glorious an...

Many people will tell you that you shouldn’t be as angry as you are lately. I am not one of those people. I actually want you to honor your anger. Many really good people are furious right now and for good reason. This outrage is natural and called for and deeply  human . It is the appropriate initial response of working hearts to the outrageous things we're witnessing in these days. The sickening...

Fear is a versatile tool in the hands of those willing to wield it. It can make otherwise sensible people irrational. It can separate them from reason and critical thinking. It can manipulate them into hating strangers. It can turn them into monsters, in the name of supposedly driving out something monstrous. And there has never been a more vivid recent display of weaponized fear’s grotesque power...

I have a confession to make: I was dead wrong about the Christian Right. I have to hand it to them, they knew what the heck they were talking about all this time. They claimed this disaster was going to happen and predicted these moments with astounding accuracy. For decades they tried to tell us that the sky was falling, that the devils were walking among us, that the end of goodness was near. Fo...

It’s beginning to look a lot like this sucks... OK, so, the holidays picked a really terrible time to show up this year: a few short weeks after a nation-splintering, Democracy-threatening, relationship-shattering election, the destructive, disorienting tremors of which have only just begun. And right now, still in the initial haze of shock and grief, tens of millions of us are looking at the cale...

Christian, Maybe you can help me here. I'm trying to reconcile two things I’ve seen. On one hand, I’ve seen your house: carefully strewn with glowing lights, fragrant boughs of holly decking your photo-covered hallways. I’ve seen your ceiling-scraping tree, limbs weighed down with the carefully-curated collection of fragile keepsakes and handcrafted mementos acquired over decades. I’ve seen your o...

Being a part of History ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s rare in life that we can say we are in truly unprecedented times—but here we are. This is a pivot point moment for our nation and for the world really, and despite how we are processing it or how we feel about it or the other places we’d prefer to be, we are here. And right now in this moment, we can all admit to having a lot more quest...

In the wake of the election results, one of the most common media postmortems has been the Democratic Party’s supposed failure to reach those Americans who they were unable to persuade over the course of the campaign; rural and working class voters, especially. The airways have been filled with politicians and talking heads offer their critiques and suggestions on how Democrats need to rethink how...

A friend from Australia texted me last week. He’d been watching the election news and said he wanted to check on me. We’re heartbroken to see what’s going on there.  he wrote.  Is it really as bad as it looks? Another sweet reader from England messaged me this morning with similar concern for me and for our nation, based on what she’s been reading and seeing in the media. Over the past two weeks,...

"God will not be mocked." Growing up a Christian, I heard that phrase more times than I can count, often punctuating the finger-wagging sermons of sweaty, red-faced evangelists in their daily, thunderous AM radio diatribes against the evildoers assailing the world; or the slick sermons of megachurch minsters, returning to a tried-and-true playbook for one more Sunday morning congregational guilt t...

Resistance is not futile, but it is exhausting. In the middle of the night following the election, as the sick reality was starting to set in, I began to get frantic texts, emails, and messages on social media from people who were trying to wrap their minds around the absolute worst-case scenario. They were processing what seemed like inconceivable information, and the fear was fierce and rising q...

"Hatred won." Many times a day I now find myself thinking this; maybe just as some internal primal scream therapy, an emotional pressure-release to fend off a coming explosion, a way of coping with so much hitting the fan in this country at one time. I say the words to myself, and after a few disorienting seconds the feeling passes. I breathe and realize my overreaction. There is a brief moment of...

If you voted for Donald Trump again, you owe my children an apology. You owe them an apology for making them spend these critical years with a hateful, incompetent, petulant, predatory monster as their President. For placing their safety in the hands of a rapist and felon whose entire existence revolves around his own well-being at the expense of the most vulnerable. For unleashing the fierce tide...

The results of the presidential election have force-fed many of us the most bitter of pills: we were wrong about America. The fact that the results weren’t even close despite Trump’s campaign formed almost exclusively of xenophobia, misogyny, and white nationalism, is confirmation that a substantial portion of this nation is no longer accessible by reason or data or empathy. Numbed by a cocktail o...

There is joy in MAGAville right now. They’re arrogantly reveling in a euphoric moment they’ve been lustfully coveting for the past four years: their mobster messiah has risen from the dead, his glorious second coming imminent, his anti-woke American kingdom come. And in their emotionally-intoxicated state they’re puffing out their chests on social media, brazenly posturing on street corners, toast...

“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.” You’ve been hearing that for the past few months and seeing the sentiment pop up on social media in the wake of the election: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over a political position or a ballot choice. I just wanted to offer a slightly dissenting opinion: b******t. That made philosophical sense...

I imagine you're exhausted right now.  It's easy to wake up in the morning in a week like this (if you’ve slept at all the night before), and to feel as though your efforts over the past weeks and months haven't made a difference, as if all your sacrifice hasn't been worth it, as if your voice didn’t count. I need you to hear something clearly: Your efforts have made a difference. Your sacrifice h...

This is probably a really bad idea. Writing while grieving deeply is like drunk-tweeting: it’s likely not going to come out well or effectively convey anything helpful. I don’t feel like I have real encouragement to offer you and I don’t want to b******t you or myself by trying to pretend that I do. But maybe reaching out to you right now, in the middle of the disorienting hurricane inside my head...

We're finally here. After all the work and worry and predicting and waiting we've reached this day, one that will change many so things around us. I'm pretty much physically and emotionally exhausted, as I know many of you are, but it's the good kind of tired; the sweet fatigue from working for something beautiful you believe in and want to see continue. It's the feeling of knowing you left it all...

We’re all worried about this Tuesday, friends. It is the place our minds and hearts are solely fixed on. Right now our energies are understandably marshaled and our hopes pinned to this singular day ahead, as if at the end of it we will have some resolution, some sense of closure, as if healing and rest will finally come. But what if things don't go that way? What if the news is bad? At a recent t...

This is an urgent moment. In the days before the most consequential election of our lifetimes, a disturbing fiction has taken hold in many progressive voters’ minds: the idea that rejecting Kamala Harris in the voting booth is a way of hurting her personally; that abstaining or protest voting is an effective individual penalty for what they believe is her mishandling of the deadly crisis in the Mi...

Donald Trump is absolutely right about us: we are the enemy within. We are the enemy within homes and family holiday gatherings , filled with people we once loved and respected; older relatives who, when growing up, told us to be good people and to live with honesty and decency, who taught us to stand up to the bullies and to make sure no one was abused for being different. We are there to make th...

I thought we had an agreement here. Rational human beings are supposed to have a bottom: a base level of decency that defines us, a place we will not go, because to go there would mean abandoning the very moral givens that tether us to one another and slipping into inhumanity. We are expected as participants in community to have some ethical boundaries that hedge us in and prevent the very worst o...