The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

There’s an old saying: “When the horse is dead… dismount.” It’s time to stop beating this one, America. It’s not going anywhere. These people cannot be helped. We’ve tried for ten years now. We’ve tried to understand them. We’ve tried to listen to them. We’ve given them the benefit of the doubt. We’ve tried not to assign motive to them, not to speculate as to why they voted the way they voted, not...

Dear President Trump, It’s taken me a while to realize and admit this, but I’m grateful to you. I’ve spent a decade openly lamenting your presence and the poison it has so effortlessly released into our nation’s blood system. Today, I find myself horrified at a second term that is doing even greater damage than I ever imagined it could. My heart has been hourly broken as I’ve watched our country i...

Watching Vice President JD Vance, a professed Christian, stand before our nation this week and repeatedly lie about the Trump Administration’s illegal and immoral assaults on our America and its people, I’m reminded again that White, self-identified Christians have caused all of this. They have fully, grievously, and irreparably failed us all. If not for them, Donald Trump’s video confession of as...

In days like these, information is hazardous. Yesterday morning, before my feet had even hit the floor, I opened up Instagram, and sitting at the top of my feed was a video of a group of ICE agents driving a man’s face into the pavement and pepper-spraying him at point-blank range. Just below that, a petrified and screaming child alone, surrounded by masked thugs. And underneath that, a wide-eyed...

At this point, decent people need to face a painful truth: Far too many of our family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and classmates are fully complicit in this carnage. His absolute disregard for the Constitution, throwing our nation into perpetual chaos;his rejection of the rule of Law, stripping elemental rights from tens of millions of Americans;his unthinkable, unspeakable treatment...

Republican friends, if I were in your shoes a decade ago, we wouldn’t be here right now. If he had run as a Democrat, it would have been a nonstarter. You wouldn’t have needed to spend the last ten years trying to convince me or lobby my conscience, or reach down into my humanity to alter my political allegiance. You wouldn’t be exhausting yourself trying to figure out how to break me of my unwave...

What Would Jesus Do? Conservative Christians love to ask this question. They adorn their Sunday school rooms with it. They wrap it around their wrists. They saturate their social media accounts with it. They punctuate their sermons with it. The only thing they don’t want to do is actually answer it, at least not using Jesus as a measuring stick. We’ve seen that with breathtaking clarity again this...

Yesterday, I came across a TikTok by a creator who goes by the name of @professionalyapper19 , speaking eloquently about the murder of Renee Good. She correctly declared, “You can’t be a ‘good white person’ and put your body between those trying to kidnap a brown person or harm a black person. When you do that, you lose your proximity to whiteness, and you lose the benefits that come along with it...

If he finishes his second term, Donald Trump will have been president for 2,920 days. If asked by someone in the future to summarize in a single word, the scope and scale of the collective injury we’ve sustained as a people and a nation during that time, the word I keep coming back to is waste . These 2,920 days will have simply been a terrible, unforgivable, unthinkable waste. A waste of time: th...

Yesterday, a Trump supporter told me I was hateful. He was surprised when I agreed with him. For a long time, when confronted on social media or in person by a stranger or a family member with similar allegations, I passionately refuted them. I immediately mounted a fierce defense of my position, offering inarguable evidence proving that they'd mislabeled, misrepresented, or misunderstood me. I do...

Things are terrible right now: objectively, historically, inarguably, breathtakingly terrible. In fact, the list of atrocities, offenses, and abominations in front of us is too lengthy to document, even if we made that our exclusive waking work (and some of us have been). But does that all mean that hope at this moment is unwise, a fool’s errand, downright stupid? I guess it all depends on how you...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream . His dream was an expansively diverse America where every human being was afforded dignity, where the color of one’s skin was not a crime or a penalty, where each person could live unfettered by the prejudices and phobias of their neighbors. His dream was a peaceful nation marked by compassion; a “network of mutuality” whose people appealed to their better a...

Dear Concerned Friend, Thank you for your kind note letting me know that you’re worried about me, and you wonder if I realize I’m coming across as angry lately. Your assessment is correct, and yes, I do realize it. I am angry. I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry for that. I understand your discomfort, as I can imagine I’m not all that fun to be around right now, and that from time to time my words may co...

People often ask me how I can be hopeful right now. I tell them that this is the only option. Hopelessness is a waste. It's useless. It's powerless. It's also contagious. Friend, if you're feeling hopeless today, you're in good company. For many of us, it's been a tall order lately to try and fend off the discouragement that seems unrelenting: too many emergencies for us to keep track, too many wo...

There are an estimated 370,000 Christian churches in America. There’s probably one within a few minutes of you. You likely drive past dozens in the course of a day. You may even call one of them your spiritual home. And in those 370,000 buildings dotting every corner of this nation, nearly 200 million professed followers of Jesus gather in the name of loving their neighbors as themselves. 200 mill...

It’s easy to oversimplify this life; to abandon nuance in favor of a simple, binary choice that leaves no room for complexity. At times, we’re all guilty of such reductionism to escape the rigors of research and understanding. But sometimes the occasion demands a simple decision. Some moments are a sharp moral line, inviting us to declare a side. Some moments are all-or-nothing, pass-fail tests of...

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 comprised 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 with any specificity. Yet, as the 2016 p...

We all saw it. On January 6th, 2021, many of us watched it in disbelief in real time: the almost incomprehensible sight of thousands of people breaching the very seat of our Government: smashing windows, breaking through doors, setting off tear gas canisters, crushing outnumbered and overmatched Capitol police, and parading unimpeded through the chambers of Congress. As the chaos unfolded, the que...

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I honestly thought January 6th, 2021, was going to be a catalytic moment for our nation. Five years ago, watching a vicious, snarling cosplay army emblazoned with his name breaking through the barricades around the Capitol, I thought for sure the almost unthinkable horrors of that day would be a dealbreaker for even the most devoted of his sycophantic rank-and-file. B...

A few months ago, I confessed to a close friend that I’d been imagining myself in a way I never had before in over half a century of living here in America: I’d been imagining myself as an expat. Seeing my social media timeline, now filled with breaking news that is the stuff of horror films and chilling 1930s newsreels, I’b been daydreaming about what it might be like to wake up in a place that d...

us There’s a tiny prayer tucked away in the recesses of my heart for the year laid out in front of us; a modest aspiration for myself and for the sleep-deprived, emotionally dysregulated remnant of compassionate humans still inhabiting the place I’ve called home for the entirety of my journey. I don’t stretch wildly for the unrealistic, grandiose goals of fascism’s defeat or the driving out of des...

I’ve walked through hell this year. I can tell this, not by blackened, scarred feet or by singed, soot-covered clothing, but by the dark circles beneath my eyes, by the knot that refuses to release in my stomach, by the sharp crevices etched into my forehead. I can tell by my shallow breathing, my clenched jaw, by my impatience with myself and with others. Twelve months in the fire will mark you....

Ignorance is not a compelling argument at this point. We’ve all heard the theories for the past ten years: people still supporting Donald Trump are somehow victims of the partisan media and the Evangelical alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. They’re continually surrounded by fake news and carefully curated false stories, and so they aren’t bad people they just...

I miss ordinary grief. My father died ten years ago, and lately, I grow nostalgic for the less complicated days when the only mourning I needed to contend with was his loss, when I could dwell solely on adjusting to the scalding pain of his absence. It was difficult enough back then, marshalling all my energies to bear the weight of that single, catastrophic passing and how different everything no...

The Jeffrey Epstein files, once fully released, will expose Epstein, detailing his prolific atrocities once and for all. They will expose the monstrous human beings who collaborated with him in doing irreparable harm to untold numbers of girls and young women. They will expose a sprawling network of perverts and deviants who used their collective influence and wealth to violate humanity in ways th...