The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Dear Undecided Voters, We have some questions that we’ve been wanting to ask you for a while now, not knowing how to reach you. Hopefully, this can find its way to you and at least we can have a conversation of sorts, albeit an inferior one. We hear a great deal about you lately. You are the subject of polls, op-eds, think pieces, and campaign strategists commentaries. The closeness of the coming...

Something's wrong here. I can feel it in my bones. That not right-ness wakes me up at night. It shortens my breath and twists my stomach into knots. It furrows my brow and tightens my jaw. It interrupts my days with involuntary sighs and an erratic pulse. It makes me prone to seemingly random emotional detonations. I do my best to rationalize my way around the feeling; to tell myself a fictional s...

(Trigger Warning: This article deals with sexual abuse and violence and may be triggering to survivors of such abuse.) One of the great honors of the work I do, is that people turn to me when they don't believe they can turn to anyone else. They allow me sacred proximity to their suffering and their grief. And even though it is a tremendous privilege to be given access to the deepest recesses of p...

All day long I see people posting or asking the same rhetorical question: how can this race be so close? They see that on one side, we have an experienced, qualified, intelligent woman with a campaign of joy and hope; one centered on making the opportunities and benefits of this nation available to all people. They see someone who has been an experienced prosecutor and Attorney General, a respecte...

How dare you politicize a tragedy like this! This is not the time to talk about guns! You can't even wait until the bodies are in the ground! I heard that again today from the gun lovers, in the wake of another mass execution, this time in the hallways of Apalachee High School. I knew I would. And honestly, normal grieving would be preferable to this. I'd really like to have that option. We all wo...

Dear Young Men in America, These are already difficult times, for you I know. I understand how confusing it can be to wake up every day with all the changes inside and around you: to try and figure out who you are and who you're going to be, especially with so many different voices and so many conflicting messages. Many people will try and tell you what it takes to be a "real man." I'm not going t...

Dear Compassionate, Faithful, Patriotic Republican Voters, You see it too, don't you? I mean, it's obvious to you as well, isn't it? I don't think I have to list it all here for you: every Constitutional assault, every human rights rollback, every bit of Supreme Court overreach, every sickening January 6th revelation, every attack on voting rights, every incendiary sermon, every racially charged t...

The 45th President has been many things since arriving on our political landscape in 2015: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language. But he's also been a floodlight. He's fully exposed millions of people who'd kept themselves carefully concealed. I can really see them now in ways I never could previous...

Life is complicated. As much as we’d like them to be, circumstances are rarely simple or clean. The complexities we find ourselves surrounded by cannot be easily summed up in a clever meme or three hundred-word tweet. Resolution to generational geographic conflicts rarely comes in a 90-second video clip. Since October 7th, 2023, many of us have watched in disbelief and horror as violence between t...

I keep waiting. I keep waiting for Conservative Americans to awaken from their Star-Spangled stupor, to find the lucidity and sobriety that see him clearly. I keep waiting for them to stop gaslighting themselves and the truly patriotic people of this nation by telling us we haven’t seen what we’ve seen and heard what we’ve heard. I keep waiting for the ceremonial tribalism of politics to burn away...

Ever since Republicans killed Roe v Wade, I’ve been hearing that Gen Z is so pissed off that Republicans have taken away women’s body autonomy, that they are going to show up en masse in November to reject them and Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris. And the numbers are indeed showing unprecedented engagement by young voters and that they’re skewing decidedly Democrat. And while this reality giv...

Dear Evangelicals in America, I've seen what's been going on there lately. Actually, I've been watching you all along and I felt I needed to reach out because somewhere along the way, something seems to have been lost in translation: This isn't what I had planned. This wasn't the Church I set the table for two thousand year ago. It wasn't the dream I had for you when I spoke in parables about the...

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was pausing in a moment of rapturous applause during his Vice Presidential acceptance speech at the DNC, the camera panned to his family, whose effusive joy and pride were unmistakable. Suddenly, the Governor’s 17-year old son Gus rose to his feet, tears erupting from his eyes, as he pointed toward the stage and shouted “That’s my dad!”It was, to most people, a heart...

Ok, so by now, you’re probably familiar with Project 2025 . (If not, I’ll suggest that there are few more pressing things on your agenda as we approach this election). It is a 900-page document outlining in terrifying detail, Conservative Evangelical plans for a second Trump term. And followers of Jesus should want nothing to do with it. It wouldn’t be a win for the Gospel but a rejection of it. I...

Last night at the DNC, as President Biden finished his extraordinary speech , he was warmly embraced by Vice President Harris, who looked him directly in the eyes and said, "I love you so much,” while a packed arena continued their rousing sendoff for him. After the last few turbulent months it felt like a full-circle moment, one where the President could be fully seen again: no longer obscured by...

Rallies are powerful things. They are a necessary visual reminder that we’re not alone. They help provide a sense of agency in dark days, to help our minds right-size the threats that seem so towering and beyond our reach. They give us a chance to stand with a tribe of affinity and to be a tangible response to the things that burden us. Rallies are awe-inspiring, goosebump-inducing, breathtakingly...

When Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate in the coming presidential campaign, the decision was met with effusive praise from both Blue voters, as well as a disparate group of politicians and commentators. Walz’ effortless warmth, his heart-on-sleeve demeanor, and his undeniable joy for life, which have been apparent for a long time in h...

I'd been getting sick of bad news. More accurately, I'd been getting sick from bad news. I don't mean figuratively or metaphorically sick, either. I mean that it’s been making me physically ill: showing up in ever present headaches, a permanently clenched jaw, and an enduring knot in the pit of my stomach. On so many days I’d wake up in the morning and at first I’d forget the angry, bitter people...

Wake up, White Liberals, Progressives, and Moderates. It's morning in America. A lot happened while we were sleeping. This is not the nation we thought existed back on January 20th of 2009: likely the last time many of us were fully awake. Back then, we basked in the warm glow of the arrival of a Black President and we grew comfortable, nestling down into a complacency that only the blind spots of...

Joy is dangerous. It’s wild. It’s subversive. And it’s contagious. Sometimes joy shows up in the moments its arrival is least expected, after a season of protracted sorrow, when the worst seems a forgone conclusion, when you’ve been without it so long that you forget what it feels like. For the past eight years we’ve had a lot that is admirable. We’ve had convictions, we’ve had our values, we’ve h...

Sonya Massey called 911 because she was concerned she was in danger in her home. When police arrived, she was in danger. Massey was executed in her kitchen by officer Sean Grayson , a man who had been previously discharged from the Army for serious misconduct, had pled guilty to two DUIs, and been referred to take “high-stress decision” classes by a past police department. Not only did Grayson and...

Republicans are telling you something right now, America. If you listen carefully, you can hear them. With every panicked and quivering move they are clearly testifying. They are confirming how frightened they are right now. There is no other logical conclusion to be reached. There is only one reason they cull down the polling sites for thousands of people, from dozens to only one. It's the same r...

Cue the Conservative outrage machine… Social media was flooded with the performative histrionics of professed American Christians, incensed at the inclusion during the Olympics’ opening ceremony, of a drag performer parody of Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper , which they claim is another example of their incessant persecution. How could they mock God like this? What a brazen anti-Christian display!...

The night has a way of fooling you. Though it is a temporary condition, it can convince you it is permanent: that it will always be this dark, this terrifying, this lightless.  It tries to take your will away.  The night has a way of making you believe that the sun will never rise again and that you will always feel the way you do, that you should abandon hope for good. The key is in staying, in n...

Dear White Christian, it's time. It's time to admit that this was all a horrible mistake: that whether you were misled by a pastor, deceived by a politician, manipulated by partisan media, or whether you simply never dreamed it would get as bad as it's gotten—you can't let this go on any longer. This has to be a turning point; a fork in the road where you get to twist the plot into something redem...