The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

“You should let people know what you’re for , not what you’re against.” I hear this sentiment from time to time, and perhaps you do, too. The implication is that declaring your opposition to people, or laws, or movements is somehow an unhelpful negative posture that comes across as combative and confrontational and inevitably makes people back away or shut down. On its face, the idea sounds like i...

Dear MAGAs, This war has you confused, and I’d like to help you. I see your performative star-spangled posturing, your arrogant middle finger contempt for strangers half a world away, your perverse joy at the broken bodies of people with dark skin and strange headwear, and I feel like someone needs to tell you something: You’re not Donald Trump. He is not you. What I mean is that he is not like yo...

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; I fully embraced the carefully curated fiction handed to me, which I guess was understandable. For a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who identified as Christian, these myths were more true for me than...

I’m just gonna come right out and say it, I’ve had it with people right now. OK, it’s probably not particularly healthy to have a grievance with an entire species, so let me narrow that down a bit. I’m having a really hard time with the unbothered people, the “everything is gonna be fine” people, the people who are acting as though they are above those of us who are blowing gaskets, breaking down,...

Hey, guys, it’s time for us to have a white man-to-white man conversation. We need to talk about how we’re going to clean up the catastrophic mess we’ve made here. And we need to be honest with ourselves and reckon with the truth that this nation is in the perilous place it is, because we have collectively failed the human test. Our handiwork is everywhere right now: The rabid nationalism that has...

Earlier this week, a friend from Australia sent me a text. He’d been watching the 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 emailed me this morning with similar concern for our nation and for me, based on what she’s been reading and seeing in the media. Over the past year,...

If I hear one more Evangelical claim that God anointed Donald Trump, I swear I’m gonna rapture myself. It’s sinful. It’s blasphemous. It’s lousy evangelism. It’s terrible theology. It’s also just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as moral deal breakers, Conservative White Ch...

The U.S./Israeli attacks on Iran are reminding us once again of the collective failure of public discourse. Our ability to hold complexity is evaporating. Our willingness to accommodate nuance is vanishing. Our need for all-or-nothing purity stances is becoming insatiable. Our tolerance for tension is expiring. Over the last few days, several dangerous myths have surfaced; a series of purported tr...

Christian fundamentalists and Republican politicians are going to bring Jesus back, even if they have to kill us all in the process. We’re now four days into Benjamin Netanyahu’s and our self-identified “peace President’s” war in Iran that has triggered domestic unrest, incited international chaos, and generated Stock Market panic. It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effor...

America, he is not worth this. This unrelenting chaos that we find ourselves emotionally drowning in: the manufactured emergencies, fabricated culture wars, and conjured crises that hound us from the moment we rise exhausted, until the second our besieged nervous systems finally allow us a brief, though uneasy respite. He is not worth this prolific corruption, the boundless breach of ethics and le...

As I watched scores of panic-stricken fathers in Iran, bloodying their hands, desperately tearing through the hulking rubble entombing their children, I grieved deeply. I mourned over their valiant but futile efforts to extricate life from beneath the crushing carnage surrounding them. I mourned the senseless destruction of dozens of radiant young lives eradicated in the span of a heartbeat by a n...

Welcome to another day. You probably didn’t give much thought to the fact that you’re here, that you woke up. You likely haven’t stopped to breathe in deeply, to feel the air expand your chest, and to let it fall slowly as it departs. You probably haven’t taken a second to realize that you’re alive. There’s a good chance your mind has already been overtaken by all the things you need to do, the ta...

Good people have had it. It’s been enough of a decade-long gut punch watching a sizable portion of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a stuporous, sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person our species has produced. And, it’s been rightly heartbreaking witnessing once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity, to find themselves...

Teach your children well. Their father’s hell did slowly go by. And feed them on your dreams. The one they pick’s, the one you’ll know by. - Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young One thing you learn as you raise children is that they’re always watching, always listening, always learning; that you are forever teaching them something even when you’re unaware: about what you value, about the way to treat p...

Hey, US Men’s Hockey Team, you may not realize this, but you just won the gold medal. Not just in ice hockey, but in misogyny. Watching you all hunched around a phone loudly laughing it up while a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial pedophile unnecessarily (but quite predictably) belittles your female counterparts, I gotta tell ya, the national pride was off the charts. I mean, I was this c...

It’s taken me a long time, but I think I’ve finally found the truth that will truly set me free. After all these years watching so many of my fellow Americans convert while pushing him away, I think I’m ready to invite MAGA Jesus into my heart. It’s not inspiration, inner conviction, or divine revelation that has led me to this holy conversion moment; it’s mainly just fatigue. I’m tired. Caring ab...

It’s just sports, right? I mean, at the end of the day, it really means nothing. In the grand scheme of things, this is all pretty inconsequential. With every horrible thing happening here at home, what a group of strangers does on a slab of ice or a frozen hillside a few thousand miles away doesn’t impact me in the slightest, I know that. So, why the hell was I crying? As I watched Alysa Liu, the...

That nightmarish hellscape… That godforsaken island of unthinkable horrors, crafted by men whose disfigured, darkened minds cannot be stepped into by normal human beings. This is about that terrible place. That suffering… The tortured screams and silent anguish of the most tender and vulnerable, physical. and emotional wounds so marrow deep that they will never fully heal. This is about that agony...

And the artists will lead us… This week, the legendary U2 dropped a surprise 6-song EP called Songs of Ash , a collection of tracks the band said in a press release, “couldn’t wait.” The music speaks explicitly to the human rights crises in America, Iraq, Ukraine , and Gaza. The song American Obituary is a breathtaking commentary on the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and the murder of Renee Good. U...

Well, this is a difficult message to deliver, but it’s necessary, given recent events in America. I’ve done a good deal of painful soul-searching over the past two weeks, facing the truth about my past and coming to terms with my failures as both a human being and as someone who aspires to be a leader. After many hours of honest reflection, prayer, and the support of wise counsel, I feel that in o...

On the day I die, a lot will happen. Many things will change. The world will be busy. On the day I die, all the important appointments I made will be left unattended. The many plans I had yet to complete will remain forever undone. The calendar that ruled so many of my days will now be of no use to me. All the material things I chased and treasured will be left for others to care for or discard, p...

Hey, is this thing on? Are you out there? Do You fiscal Conservatives still exist? Are Red-Voting followers of Jesus still a thing? Because right now, I’m having a really hard time accounting for either of you. According to The Washington Post , ICE is spending 38.3 billion dollars to buy warehouses across the country and turn them into detention centers. 38 billion. We seemingly can’t afford to p...

Growing up in the Church, I believed in Hell. In the story I inherited, there was a place where monstrous people would spend an excruciating eternal afterlife suffering for the vile things they did in this life; a prison of their own making in which all the sins of their past would be visited upon them a hundredfold. There would be no rest, no reprieve, no end. There would only be their continuous...

JD Vance claims to be a follower of Jesus. In fact, he never shuts up about it. He wears his religion openly, brandishing it at every opportunity in performative piety and finger-wagging condescension, while justifying the harboring of pedophiles, the rolling back of human rights, and the indiscriminate assaults of brown-skinned people by government-funded, masked mercenaries. Vance is doing all t...

This will all be over soon, America. The sundowning of the MAGA movement is upon us. The signs are everywhere. As much as History can be an albatross in moments like these, alerting us to the terrifying ways in which we are repeating the past pathologies of inhumanity, she can also be a source of comfort; a reminder of the inevitability of the endings of all evil things. If we consult her with a c...