The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Friend, I may not know you, but I’m pretty sure I know some things about you: I know you feel something breaking inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of, one that seems to grow deeper by the hour. I know you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those qualities in...

While so many of us here in America are rightly lamenting the devastating emotional effect this repulsive regime is having on girls and young women, we’ve only been getting half the story. In the unrelenting storm of Conservative’s legislative assaults on body autonomy, their withholding of the unredacted Epstein files, and their coronation of a court-adjudicated rapist to the highest seat of powe...

I often find myself in a now-familiar spot with Trump supporters I know: hopelessly stuck in an unnavigable impasse on our respective paths, unable to find a way forward. And when the friction becomes too great, the exchange too heated, and the tension too uncomfortable, they invariably drop an all-too-familiar final salvo designed to stop the conversation and avoid pressing ahead: "We're just goi...

Dear Ms Bondi, I’m writing to you as an American citizen, a former pastor, and the father of a daughter. I spent today, as much of the nation, watching you speak before the House Judiciary Committee in a state of stunned disbelief, which surprised me, as I thought you’d reached a moral bottom many weeks ago. I witnessed you posturing and protesting, feigning indignation in the face of reasonable q...

MAGA Americans have a Bunny living rent-free in their heads. (We’ll just call it BDS: Bunny Derangement Syndrome.) Their president has posted late-night, untethered, rambling word salads about him. Their media surrogates have gone on racist tirades against him, seeking to reclaim football for oppressed white people. Their lawmakers have demanded investigations and deportations, clutching their pea...

White friend, you’re not an activist. Or, at least maybe that’s the way you’ve always felt. Perhaps you don’t see yourself in a street with a sign yelling slogans, shouting through a bullhorn on courthouse steps, wielding your social media profile like an independent news outlet, or standing at a school board meeting, elevating your voice to rise above the jeers of your hateful neighbors. These th...

Sometimes you can forget the point of it all. It’s easy when the horrors have become commonplace to become so beaten down and disheartened by the fight that you can lose sight of why you’re doing it. The repeated brutality and the relentless sorrows and the never-ending crises can squeeze out and suffocate your imagination, gradually rendering you unable to see a future worth walking into anymore....

Dear Republican Voters, Trump Supporters, White Evangelicals, and MAGA Faithful, I’d like to ask you some questions, and I’d like to hear your honest responses… If the President is a pedophile, don’t you want to know? If the person in the highest seat of power in our nation is a serial predator, isn’t it important to bring that truth into the light? If our Commander-in-Chief committed sexual abuse...

Yesterday, a Trump supporter dropped a lengthy, rambling, profanity-laden diatribe into my comments section, lecturing me for implying that MAGA is inherently a white supremacist movement. In between vile personal attacks and egregious spelling errors, he accused me of “playing the Race Card", of making assumptions about people like him, and of stoking division in America (a fracture first caused,...

Donald Trump shared an unspeakably racist meme about President Obama and Michelle Obama on social media. With our nation stretched to its breaking point by a litany of Constitutional crises and human rights emergencies, just a hair’s breadth from exploding into inexorable chaos, our sitting president used the unrivaled platform he has been given to perpetuate one of the longest-running and most de...

You hear it, don’t you? The conspicuous silence? The supposed pro-life Christians have gone awfully quiet lately. In fact, come to think of it, they’ve virtually vanished ever since the Epstein files began floating up from the depths of billionaire-birthed hell and into the national discourse (at least, once they realized some of the names within them). As the Trump Administration worked tirelessl...

Dear ICE Agent, This morning, I woke up abruptly after another night of disrupted sleep and replaying nightmares. My mind and body, though exhausted, could not rest, plagued by a parade of horrifying visions of unthinkable violence that passed in front of me the night before: A disabled veteran, intentionally targeted by an SUV and knocked to the ground, the driver opening his door only to add ins...

Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are. Sometimes they out themselves. Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on...

I’m not with them. Hundreds of times every day, I feel compelled to break into strangers’ conversations on social media or in the checkout line or in my neighborhood, whenever I see them encountering professed Christians who support this president, his platform, and his actions—and I want to apologize profusely to them. As someone who seeks to follow Jesus and aspire to his teachings of compassion...

Whew, this is a tough one to write, but I’ll try to get it out if you’ll bear with me. For the past couple of months, I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching, have spent hours in quiet reflection, and faced some hard truths. I need to come clean now and get this all out in the open. I confess that all those MAGAs in my mentions have been right all along: I am woke. “How woke?”, you ask. I hope...

I’m sorry to break it to you, MAGA Christians, but America isn’t a Christian nation. In fact, God doesn’t bless it, either. That’s not how this works. Now, I know this blows up the convenient narrative you’ve been selling for the past 250 years (and pretty violently the last year or so), but honestly, that nasty bit of heresy is straight-up of the devil, and it needs to go. I’m not sure where you’...

I can understand why Conservative men support a serial predator like Donald Trump. He embodies the fragile masculinity that so many are afflicted with. He validates their misogyny, giving voice to the antiquated, knuckle-dragging sexist garbage they save for mindless locker room monologues and man-cave hangs with other neighborhood Neanderthals. Trump is the unsurprising idol of teen and college-a...

As I watch men on the Right arguing against the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, I am reminded again how weak they all are, what a pathetic joke MAGA manhood is as an idea. Despite all their performative Don’t Tread on Me bluster, they are morally impotent in the moments that truly matter. When the opportunity arrives for them to put their money where their mouths are and make a courageous st...

There is no shortage of people to be enraged about right now. I’m angry at this vile, repugnant, cognitively-addled despot urinating on our Constitution and driving our nation into the moral abyss. I’m furious with his complicit collaborators in Congress who could have so easily prevented this at any time, including this one. I’m sickened by genuflecting media members, gutless public servants, and...

It’s exhausting to give a damn, isn’t it? To be a person of compassion in a time and place when compassion is in such great demand? To wake up every day in days like these, and push back against predatory politicians, toxic systems, human rights atrocities, acts of treason, and spiritual leadership failures? The volume and the relentlessness of the threats can be wearying. You may have noticed. Bu...

“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.” You’ve probably seen these sentiments pop up on social media, come across them in eloquent think pieces, or heard them in daily conversations: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over something as benign as a political position or a ballot choice. That idea made philosophical sense before 2016, back w...

I’m not sure Americans really understand what we’re facing right now. I do. I’ve spent most of the last thirty years as a local church pastor, much of that in megachurches in the Bible Belt. I’ve been shoulder to shoulder in ministry and in life with white Evangelicals; I’ve sat in Bible studies with them, served alongside them in staff meetings, attended hundreds of pastoral gatherings, eavesdrop...

Transcript: Hey my friends, I wanted to come on here and just share a few thoughts about the days in which we find ourselves. You’re obviously heartbroken right now. You’re grieving. You’re frustrated. You’re angry. And all of that can lead you into a place of despair, hopelessness, resignation. Now, I know that because I’m in the same boat. I’m feeling all the same stuff that you’re feeling. I wa...

Denial is a powerful drug. In the wake of the unthinkable images and footage coming out of Minneapolis over the last weeks, it’s easy to feel insulated from the chaos if we happen to reside somewhere else in the country, as if our geography protects us, as if Minnesota is some distant land we are separated from and can view from insulated safety. As we witness masked, heavily-armed, untethered, an...

Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE, in cold blood, without cause, and with giddy joy from his assassins. For simply bearing witness to a neighbor’s abuse, for being the kind of person we all say we aspire to be, for being present to an imperiled stranger, he was executed in the street by our government. It is as tragic and frightening as any day in my lifetime: The complete disregard for his life by...