Charlie Is A Martyr

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It pretty much goes without saying that many Christians grow uneasy when the conversation turns to politics. They hear words like life, marriage, family, manhood, womanhood, religious liberty, and natural law, and they instinctively hesitate. Why is this?

I give speeches about this on occasion. I do so because, unfortunately, Christians have been incessantly told these are political issues. Perhaps worse, their pastors were trained to think of them that way, too. Admittedly, while I don’t remember a single lesson in Two Kingdoms theology at the seminary, I do remember being told to avoid talking politics with my people. And so, for many years, I didn’t, which meant I naturally avoided any topic labeled as political. The ill-fated result was a type of absolute separationism that the Founding Fathers did not intend. Still, somehow the Church was convinced to leave the state to its dealings and the Church to hers. Indeed, we churchmen have far more important things to do—Word and Sacrament things. Local, state, and federal policy is none of our business.

Are you sure about that?

I suppose there’s a reasonable measure of piety to be found in the concern, if only because the Christian pulpit should never become a place where the Gospel is reduced to an election strategy. I certainly didn’t endure seminary training to become little more than an appendage of Washington, Lansing, or any other earthly capital.

So, I suppose in one sense, I agree with the concern. Still, the piety as defined is incredibly incomplete.

Life in the parish has taught me a few things. For starters, I’ve learned that the devil is quite happy to be in charge of deciding what belongs in whatever category. He convinces a husband that watching porn doesn’t equate to cheating on his wife. He convinces a believer that he can still call himself a Christian while refusing to attend worship. Yeah, okay. Similarly, in this instance, Satan is more than pleased to slap the label “political” onto something if, by doing so, that means the Church will steer clear of it, if only because the label marks its object as out of bounds. I’ve been told by countless Christians that the topic of abortion is political. I’ve been told by just as many that marriage laws and LGBTQ Inc.’s efforts are civil issues—political issues—and therefore, none of the Church’s business. I’ve had fingers wagged at me for saying from the pulpit that transgender surgery for children is ungodly child-mutilation, and that to insert that into a sermon was political.

The devil is also quite content to corral us into using only Bible-y words. He’s more than happy to let us talk about peace and forgiveness and love for the neighbor in the abstract while the unborn child is treated as disposable—while marriage is completely redefined, families are destroyed, and children are handed over to ideologies that teach them to despise the bodies God gave them. The devil is quite pleased to have us speak in generalities from the pulpits and in Bible studies about God’s beautiful creation while male and female are legislated into costumes, religious liberty is recast as bigotry, and natural law is openly mocked as though that same beautiful creation has no say whatsoever.

So yes, call them political issues if you want. I suppose, at a minimum, doing so helps a person see where the fight is actually taking place. It helps you see that life is debated in legislatures. It shows you that marriage is being defined by the courts, and that family is being shaped by school boards and bureaucracies. It reveals that religious liberty is currently being defended or surrendered through public pressure, leading to ungodly statutes lathered in dreadful policies that persecute rather than preserve. Natural law is suffering the same. Have you noticed how it’s essentially being buried under a mountain of slogans?

Quite frankly, the devil prefers these topics to be fixed in the political sphere. The kingdom of the left—the civil government—is the one place where human beings can be forced to submit under threat. It’s in the kingdom of the left where humans can either formalize reality or rebel against it.

I learned years ago to narrow my eyes at anyone who equates biblical fidelity with political speech. That’s because I’ve since learned that many, even in the Church—especially in the Church—have it backward.

The first thing to keep in mind is that politics was second to the discussion. Christ was here first. With that, I’m willing to say that almost every major cultural issue in our world today is already Christological in nature, especially the ones I already mentioned. They do not belong first to politics. They belong to Christ. That means they belong to the Church. That also means the world cannot tell us when, where, and how we ought to speak of or engage with them. We own them.

The topic of life belongs to us because Christ is the Author of life, the One in whom was life and through whom all things were made (John 1:3-4, Acts 3:15). Marriage belongs to us because God’s Word makes clear that Christ is the epicenter of its mystery from the beginning (Ephesians 5:25-32). He is the Bridegroom. We are the bride. Family belongs to us because Christ has revealed God as Father and has made us His children through Baptism (Matthew 6:9, Galatians 3:26-27, and Ephesians 3:14-15). Manhood belongs to us because of Christ’s incarnation. He is the eternal Word made flesh and is the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (John 1:14, 1 Timothy 2:5, and Hebrews 2:14-17). Womanhood belongs to us for the same reason. Christ took upon Himself flesh from the Virgin Mary and honored motherhood in the economy of salvation (Luke 1:30-35, 42-43 and Galatians 4:4). Religious liberty belongs to us because Christ alone is Lord of the Christian conscience, and we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29, Romans 14:4, and 1 Corinthians 7:23). Natural law—which pretty much touches everything in the entire world—belongs to us because all things were created through Christ and for Christ (Romans 11:36). Not only that, but the law written on the heart still bears witness to the Creator’s order (Romans 2:14-15 and Colossians 1:16-17).

Having said this, and considering recent rumblings in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod as it heads into convention this summer, I should add that this is also where the objection to calling Charlie Kirk a martyr begins to come undone.

Some Christians insist he died as a result of political speech. Some will go still further and say it was divisive political speech, maybe even bigoted. And then, like clockwork, they’ll regurgitate some of the more popular fabrications. For example, even though he regularly had black female guests as experts on his show and as speakers at TPUSA events, some quote him as saying, “Black women do not have the processing power to be taken seriously.” He never said that. Ever. The line is an outright invention, and yet it keeps getting passed around, if only because it does exactly what his enemies need it to do. As another example, people say he called LGBTQ people a “contagion.” He didn’t call anyone a contagion. But he did point to reliable statistics, referring to the rising numbers of gay and transgender children as demonstrating “social contagion” metrics, and from there, he warned against the increased ideological capture of children through the rejection of God’s natural law and the deliberate confusion of the body God gives.

Ultimately, fabricated quotations, mangled summaries, and phrases ripped from context will never define anyone, most especially Charlie. He was a crisp speaker, arguing from the lordship of Christ over all things. To his enemies, he was horrifyingly effective. Therefore, it became necessary to recast Charlie’s perspectives into “racism,” “hatred,” or “bigotry.”

But Christians know better. We know the real point is what he actually confessed and why he confessed it, not what his opponents needed him to have confessed in order to despise him. Ultimately, Charlie engaged every topic as a Christian, openly insisting that his listeners first understand faith in Christ as his point of origin in every discussion or debate. In other words, he did everything as an emissary of Jesus. He observed each and every topic through the lens of the Gospel, and then went straight into public conversation as one who already knew Christ owned any topic he chose to confront.

If a Christian is killed because he publicly confessed Christ’s claim over life, the body, marriage, the home, conscience, liberty, the order God has written into creation, and all the extraneous points extending from these things, simply calling it political speech just doesn’t work. If anything, it merely proves how successful the devil’s tactics have been. It shows how deeply politics has trespassed onto the Church’s property—onto holy ground.

In the end, the simplest point here is that heaven gives no permission to the Church to surrender these things. Caesar may regulate them. Courts will distort them. Activists from every strange perspective will weaponize them. Political parties of every persuasion will almost certainly exploit them. Still, they’re the Church’s property. The Church owns them all. She has received them from the hand of God, and with that, she goes forth into the world as their guardian, being sure to hold the government to its ordination relative to them.

I will always enter the public square without apology. Even as a pastor, I belong there. Of course, I don’t go there because politics is my ultimate. I go there because Christ is.

So, again, call all these things political if you want. But just remember what politics is actually doing. It’s merely trying to handle what Christ already owns.

Fear’s Ambiguity

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There are moments when a church body betrays itself more by what it avoids saying than by what it actually says. Of course, you need more context to understand what I mean by this.

Essentially, I wrote and submitted an overture asking the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, in convention this summer, to acknowledge Charlie Kirk as a modern Christian martyr, establish September 10 as a Day of Prayer for Faithful Witnesses in Our Time, and call the Church to renewed courage in public confession under the cross. Two other similar overtures were submitted, both supported by multiple districts and circuits. Admittedly, mine was the more aggressive of them in asking the Synod to establish a specific day of prayer and remembrance. Still, the fact that there were three shows that the concern was shared by countless others. (You may read the original overtures on pages 330 and 331 in the Convention Workbook, which is found at https://files.lcms.org/file/preview/2026-convention-workbook.)

The floor committees responsible for handling the overtures have met. Their task was to review submitted overtures, combine related matters where they saw fit, and present final resolutions for action. In this case, they produced a generic omnibus resolution condemning political violence and encouraging public service while avoiding Charlie Kirk entirely. (You may read the replacement overture on page 91 by visiting  https://files.lcms.org/file/preview/2026-todays-business-issue-1.)

I’ll speak plainly for myself. The replacement overture currently on its way to the convention is a fine example of institutional evasiveness. It condemns political violence. It encourages peaceful participation in public life. It quotes Scripture. It even cites the Confessions. From there, it commends Lutheran resources on church and state. But together, it has the all-too-familiar scent of committee caution. The whole effort has been scrubbed clean of Charlie.

The whole reason this replacement overture even exists is that something concrete happened nine months ago. Charlie Kirk was murdered. It happened publicly. He was shot and killed for Christian conviction—for speaking in defense of life, marriage, family, manhood, womanhood, religious liberty, and the lordship of Christ over all things. These are all things treated with open contempt by very powerful forces in American life. His death was therefore more than another entry in the tragic ledger of political violence, as the new overture implies by withholding any and all references to him. Charlie’s death exposed what so many Christians in the trenches already know, and what many institutional churchmen still seem desperate to avoid—or at a minimum, soften. And it’s simply this: Confession of Christ in the public square has a cost.

Charlie paid it.

And yet, the replacement overture refuses to even mention his name. That alone tells me almost everything I need to know. By the way, I should make it clear that I am not accusing Committee Chairman Christopher Esget or Vice-Chairman Lucas Woodford of having a hand in this. I know them both. They were clearly outnumbered by both opponents and institutional cautionaries. The result? Smoothing the matter into a generic condemnation of political violence in order to lessen the risk of offending the more left-leaning elements in the LCMS, which I know exist. Back in March, I gave a speech seasoned with elements of my relationship with Charlie to a relatively large LCMS gathering. No sooner did I begin mentioning his name in a positive way than at least ten of the fifty-plus tables got up and walked out in protest.

How dare an LCMS pastor say anything positive about such a public figure espousing divisive rhetoric?! By divisive rhetoric, do you mean his fearless defense of what we LCMS Lutherans believe, teach, and confess in unity—in synod—in our supposed walking together?

Well, whatever. People getting up and walking out of one of my speeches doesn’t bother me. And it doesn’t change the central fact. Charlie confessed the true Christ, and with that, he was a public Christian figure who labored in defense of truths that Scripture teaches and the Church confesses. He spoke in the open. He did so knowing that, for one reason or another, many would hate him for it. Still, he went. And he was ultimately killed for that public confession and for no other reason. That is martyrdom in the truest sense of the word, and as I said, he’s the only reason we’re having this conversation.

Relative to the original three overtures, it seems a no-brainer that, throughout history, the Church has remembered her notable martyrs. That’s because we know with certainty that Christ sustained their confession under the cross. And so, naturally, the Church remembers them because their blood preaches with otherworldly eloquence to the living. And she says their names because she knows that nameless remembrance becomes abstraction.

Unfortunately, abstraction is almost always the first refuge of fearfulness. I’ve seen it a thousand times in the political sphere. We may be seeing it here, if only because the omnibus overture takes Charlie’s death and dissolves it into “multiple assassination attempts,” “violent conflicts,” and “many other sad examples of division.” Those things are real, and political violence should be condemned wherever it appears. However, the whole force of the matter is lost when the Synod is asked to speak about everything in general because it lacks the willingness to name Charlie in particular.

But again, we’ve seen this a thousand times. History teaches that’s exactly how bureaucracies mourn. They widen the lens until the real issue disappears into ambiguity.

Now, I know some are reading this and already objecting, assuming Charlie should be excluded from remembrance because his theology was not exclusively Lutheran. That brings to mind something I wrote and shared with the men in my own circuit with the same concerns when I first introduced the overture. At one point along the way, I wrote to them:

“Something came to mind during our Children’s Christmas service rehearsal yesterday morning. While we were singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, I was reminded that the hymn comes to us from Charles Wesley. As LCMS Lutherans, we are far from Charles Wesley doctrinally. We do not share his theology of the sacraments, ministry, or conversion. And yet, without hesitation, we sing his words, teach them to our children, and gladly receive the hymn as a faithful witness to the incarnation of Christ. We do this not because we endorse Wesley wholesale, but because we recognize that God’s truth can be confessed clearly and beautifully even through someone with whom we have real theological differences. We’re capable of distinguishing between honoring a faithful confession at a particular point and canonizing the entire theological system of the person who made it. At least, I believe we’re capable of making and maintaining that distinction within the Church. Either way, that’s the distinction I was reaching for with Charlie, who, many of you know, was my personal friend. The epicentral point of alignment is not that he was Lutheran, or that we would affirm every position he held, but that he died confessing Christ. His death was, in that sense, a confession of Christ to the end, and that confession stands on its own. Memorializing him by name need not imply doctrinal agreement any more than singing Wesley’s hymn does. Overture or hymn, in both cases, the Church is not saying, ‘This person was right about everything,’ but rather, ‘Here, Christ was confessed.’ That, it seems to me, is something we have long known how to recognize as Confessional Lutherans.”

Now, had I thought to do it at the time, I might even have added some of the names we recall formally in the Lutheran Service Book. Ironically, we remember Gregory the Great on September 3, which would be seven days before the date I’m recommending for Charlie. Gregory the Great played a role in developing the theology of purgatory in the Western church, a doctrine that Lutherans explicitly reject as dangerously false. Still, we remember him for other reasons, one of which is his Regula Pastoralis, a timeless exposition of pastoral care. Meanwhile, Charlie openly confessed himself a Christian according to the Nicene Creed, which I know firsthand served as a rudder for his public and private confession of Christ. Not to mention, he began events saying as much.

Apart from these things, indeed, this remains a teachable moment for our churches. In an age that requires bold confession—even as the replacement overture quotes Luther’s Large Catechism, rightly saying that the devil seeks to destroy peace through contention, murder, sedition, and war—I can assure you that Satan also appreciates bureaucratic fog, the kind that insists the best way through controversy is through safe and inoffensive generalities.

The Synod had before it three concrete opportunities to teach clearly about martyrdom, vocation, public witness, and the cost of confessing Christ in an increasingly hostile age. At a minimum, it could’ve edited those, easily showing, without causing any division, that Charlie Kirk’s death matters because public Christian confession matters. His death became a holy opportunity for the Church to preach Christ crucified while teaching her children that those joined to Christ should expect opposition. When a public Christian is murdered amid rising hatred for Christian truth, the Church should have enough nerve to call it what it is. She should at least have enough wits about her to understand that the real human being at the event’s center ought not go unnamed.

In the end, I don’t really care which of the three overtures the committee might choose to handle. Personally, the Wyoming overture is probably the best of the three. But either way, choose one. Cultivate it, if necessary. And as you do, leave its core alone. Leave Charlie Kirk in it. He must be named. His witness should be acknowledged. His death should be interpreted theologically. His murder should be condemned concretely. His example should summon the Church to the courage she’ll need in the forthcoming era.

If we cannot do that, the failure will say more than the replacement overture ever could. And I dare say that, since I was working with TPUSA leaders to attend the convention, arranging for them to be present and to listen as Charlie’s name is spoken by one of the last remaining denominations of biblical fidelity, this could be a huge black eye for LCMS Lutheranism. It doesn’t have to be. But it could be.

The Church must do better. The Church, in convention, must say Charlie’s name. His blood is still very fresh in Utah’s soil, and the forthcoming generation of Christians—one that overwhelmingly claims him as its own—will remember this moment.

Only So Much For So Long

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Are you a Star Wars fan? I am. Well, I kind of am. I’m not so sure anymore. The films of the original trilogy will forever be favorites. But then again, I was there in the ’70s and ’80s when they were let loose on the world. The prequels, I can take or leave them. The sequels—puke. Although there was that one scene in Episode VII where the Millennium Falcon was reintroduced. I’ll admit to having enjoyed the chase. The endless spin-offs? Just stop already. By the way, have you seen the box office results for the new The Mandalorian and Grogu film? They’re not good.

But I didn’t come here this morning to talk about how Disney murdered Star Wars. At least, not directly. In truth, Star Wars comes to mind because I read something last Wednesday that reminded me of the crime scene. And the Thoma family talked about it during dinner that same night. After that discussion, I’ve convinced myself we may have a serial killer on our hands.

Gallup keeps track of lots of things. Its latest numbers concerning LGBTQ Inc.’s acceptance in America are telling. I’m not necessarily surprised. Although I’m willing to bet that the people who thought they could force consent through exhaustion are a little bit nervous. That’s because, after years of rainbow-branded everything, Americans appear to be pulling back. Even some major corporations are taking a stand. I read last week that a few NFL teams bowed out of Pride Month. Parades in different cities can’t get the funding they used to get. Some businesses are actually putting out statements saying they were sitting it out, too. Jennifer read to me Chick-fil-A’s public statement. Take a look. It’s good.

But again, Gallup’s numbers. The findings sure seem to suggest that the public is tired of being re-educated. Support for same-sex marriage has fallen from 71% to 65% since 2023. That’s a huge shift in a very short period of time. Moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has dropped from 71% to 62%. The trajectory is the same relative to gender transitioning. Its favorability dropped from 46% to 38%.

The partisan split was somewhat interesting, too. For a time, LGBTQ Inc. seemed to be gaining traction in the Republican Party. But now it’s slipping. Republican support for same-sex marriage has fallen from 55% to 37%. It’s no surprise that the Democrat Party’s numbers didn’t move at all, remaining at 87%. On the moral acceptability of LGBTQ relationships, Republicans are at 35%. Democrats are at 81%. On changing one’s gender, only 5% of Republicans consider it morally acceptable. Democrats have far more weirdos. They’re at 60% in that category.

Regardless of anyone’s opinions, these show a vast distinction. If anything, I think these numbers show that the two main political parties in America are indeed living inside very different moral worlds. I’ll bet the LGBTQ Inc. element in both looks at these numbers and sees unfortunate regression. I look at them and see a nation rediscovering its gag reflex.

Again, as a Star Wars fan, this feels familiar. And I should probably add Marvel to the mix, too. Genuine fans who watched what happened to these two franchises will know what I mean.

At dinner on Wednesday, I made the point that both franchises were once strong because they respected the worlds they inherited. Born in the ’70s, Star Wars had myth, fathers and sons, sacrifice, redemption, darkness and light, and an almost religious awareness that power without virtue destroys the soul. Many of Marvel’s characters emerged in the ’60s. They swooped in with courage, friendship, and dutiful loyalty. Then the films began, and they held to the original concepts.

But then Disney bought Star Wars. Then Disney bought Marvel. Then came the ideological machinery designed to rework everything fans knew. But it wasn’t just slight creative enhancements. It was a complete reworking delivered in a tidal wash of political ideology. The whole thing was designed to smother all the original premises.

With that as the goal, film followed film. Spin-off followed spin-off. Streaming series followed streaming series. At dinner, I told the family that after Disney took charge, everything in the Star Wars world started to feel as if it had been processed through a lesson plan.

The box office has now supplied some interesting receipts. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a huge flop. Some estimates say it cost $500 million to make, which includes international marketing. It’s been out for a few weeks, and it’s only at $248 million in worldwide sales. It wasn’t that long ago that people were calling the new live-action Snow White film the worst flop in history. By comparison, it lost about $170 million.

Again, I told the family during dinner that Disney seems to be in the business of losing any and all money it made before it got into the business of re-education.

I think the Star Wars sequel trilogy made the forthcoming demise obvious. By the time episodes VII, VIII, and IX arrived, original fans like me (and I should include my sons, who were raised in the lore) noticed a managed demolition of our inheritance. Disney could have stewarded the franchise’s lore with humility. Instead, they treated the old world as needing renovation. All of it—the Force, the Jedi, the moral architecture that made the story resonate with billions of fans—directors and executives spoke as though the old ways needed to be challenged and remade. A line from Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi captured the new spirit. I haven’t forgotten it. He said, “Let the past die, and kill it if necessary.”

The thing is, the real caretakers of the Star Wars legacy and the source of its genuine success—billions of fans like me—we can endure a fresh story. We can endure new characters. We can even endure surprises. What we resist is contempt for received things. We resist the smugness that looks at inherited loves and assumes those loves are flawed and need to be demolished.

Disney followed the same path with Marvel. It received a massive story arc that rewarded patience and devotion. Then they began adding ideological obligation. Audiences began to drift. Why? Because the people who love the films weren’t interested in beloved things being rewritten to scold them.

I think that’s the real cultural context for Gallup’s numbers.

For a long time, Americans were told that every new moral demand represented compassion and inclusion and diversity and progress and whatever other syrupy word could be used to impose guilt. The first ask was tolerance. But very soon tolerance also meant affirmation. Affirmation demanded celebration. Now it has become compelled speech, pronoun rituals, men in women’s sports, parental rights being stripped away, and public shaming for anyone who disagrees.

I suppose this is also where tradition comes to mind. When I teach about tradition in my catechetical classes, I try to make the point that tradition is, in at least one sense, the accumulated wisdom of people who learned, sometimes painfully, that certain things are built into reality. God’s moral and natural law are exactly this. They are the deepest structure of creation. Male and female, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, the human body, the boundaries of acceptable human desire—these are simply givens, and they are far more durable than anyone with other ideas might think.

Of course, these givens do not grant permission to be cruel to the confused. Christians owe every neighbor patience, and most importantly, kindness. But kindness doesn’t require us to pretend that Disney—or anyone else for that matter—has some sort of authority to overrule creation. Kindness doesn’t require us to surrender reality. People are actually being kind—even loving—when they hold the line on what is real and what isn’t.

In the end, I’d say the Gallup numbers suggest that many Americans have reached the same point audiences reached with Star Wars and Marvel. They’ve had enough. They’ve been lectured enough. They’ve watched enough traditions get mocked and replaced by people who seem far more eager to deconstruct what human history knows to be true.

And so, in the end, the lesson is relatively simple. You can push people for a while. You can shame them for a while. You can flood every institution with the same message for a while. You can even persuade many of them that resistance will be embarrassing and costly. Still, creation has a way of reasserting itself. Reality will always outlast propaganda. And because tradition is built from real things, it has a way of surviving the people who sneer at it.

Stopping Short of the Line

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For the record, and regardless of your preferred method of information reception, I’m going to do what I do every Sunday morning. I’m going to start tapping away at the keyboard until I’m done. And when I’m finished, I’ll find an image that fits the eventual message, copy and paste the text into the media streams that normally deliver it for me, and then go about preparing for the rest of my day, which promises to be long.

Admittedly, I do have an agenda this morning. Perhaps the previous paragraph is already a noticeable wink toward it. But first, something I see more often than I prefer.

Every now and then, I pull up to a stoplight and find myself behind or beside someone who has stopped a car length from the line. For some reason, it happens a lot at the light at the end of the off-ramp from southbound US-23 onto M-59. People approach that light, sometimes stopping fifteen or twenty feet from where the front bumper belongs, leaving a stretch of perfectly usable pavement in front of them. A.J. Hurley was at my home on Friday evening. Over a whisky and cigar, I shared with him how frustrated I get when I see this, especially when every second matters at particular intersections—and that’s an intersection that matters, the light being relatively short. Twenty feet makes a difference there.

But no matter the light, the practice makes no sense to me.

That said, I assume there may be explanations for the behavior. What those explanations are, I don’t know. Perhaps those drivers have depth-perception issues. Or maybe they’re simply overly cautious, having been rear-ended and shoved into oncoming traffic at some point in the past.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the fact that the whole point of the line is to tell you where to stop your car. It’s the appointed place. It’s where the law, the road, and everybody else’s expectations meet. And I would think it’s more dangerous when someone ignores that normal expectation. The person behind you might expect you to stop in the appointed place. If you stop a car and a half length before it, you’re more likely to get rear-ended.

I drive a two-door Jeep Wrangler, which is relatively short. Admittedly, I’ve sometimes been tempted to simply pull around (even going onto the median if necessary) to park in that unused space. I’ve confessed this sinful inclination to my wife. Rest assured, I’ve never done it. I’ve only imagined it. Plenty of sins have had long and satisfying lives in my imagination while being denied a body in the real world. I’m grateful when the Holy Spirit keeps them there.

Even so, the thought arrives because it feels like a ridiculous, almost rude, waste of space. It feels as though someone came all the way to the place where the decision needed to be made and then refused to complete the approach.

This is right about the time in my writing when the skimmers start getting irritated.

I know this because some people don’t like that I tell stories in my writing. They hear an opening about lines at traffic lights and immediately want to know why I have not already made the point. They would prefer the thesis statement in the first sentence, the conclusion in the second, and the whole thing finished before the coffee cools. They want the truth in a line. Even better, a meme.

I understand the instinct. We live in a skimming age. We skim headlines. We skim articles. We skim emails. We skim the terms and conditions when we buy a car. We do the same in our mobile phone contracts, pretending to accept responsibly. We skim because there is too much to read, too much to answer, too much to carry, and too much demanding our attention.

So, in other words, skimming has become sort of a survival skill.

Again, I get it. Still, skimming has a cost. A skimmer gets the icing. A reader gets the cake. A reader can savor the truth, having received it by patience, observation, memory, humor, discomfort, recognition, and whatever other tool the writer employs in his narrative. A reader is brought to and led through the ordinary world until the ordinary world gives up something worth seeing—and then a reader understands that worth.

That’s why I often begin with the everyday things. I begin with the odd driver at the stoplight because the odd driver at the stoplight might be relatable to you. It might even be you. I begin with the useless gap in traffic because the senseless gap in traffic might become a way of seeing the senseless gaps in your own life. I begin with something small because small things have a way of carrying larger truths.

And this is where I would expect Christians to be more tolerant of the method, because Jesus Himself taught this way.

The Lord certainly spoke plainly. He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). He said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). There were times when the truth came directly.

And yet, again and again, Jesus taught by making people listen and watch something happen. He told them about a man beaten and left half dead on the road, while religious men passed by and a Samaritan stopped to show mercy (Luke 10:25-37). He told them about a younger son who wasted his inheritance, a father who ran to welcome the lost boy home, and an older son who resented that father’s grace (Luke 15:11-32). He told them about a sower scattering seed on the path, the rocks, the thorns, and the good soil (Matthew 13:1-23). He told them about a Pharisee and a tax collector who went up to the temple to pray, and the one who went home justified was the one beating his breast and begging for mercy (Luke 18:9-14).

Jesus could have summarized each lesson in a sentence. He could have reduced the Prodigal Son to a doctrinal claim and the Pharisee and tax collector to a warning against spiritual pride. Instead, He made His hearers walk through the scene. He brought them into what today’s skimmers would call irrelevant details, making them stand on the road, in the field, at the house, near the temple, beside the wounded man, beside the angry brother, beside the seed that failed, beside the sinner who had nothing to offer except a quiet plea for mercy in darkness’s corner.

But here’s the thing. Like it or not, a story slows us down. Yes, it requires our time. But in the same way Jesus understood, a story is sometimes the only thing that gets past the gate we set up to protect ourselves from confronting something we might otherwise avoid. It gets past our efforts to avoid being corrected. A story lets us nod along until we suddenly realize we have been implicated. Nathan understood this when he came to David with the story of a rich man, a poor man, and a beloved little lamb. David burned with anger against the man in the story, and then Nathan said, “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:1-7). The story is what Nathan used to help lead David across the distance he’d placed between himself and truth.

In that sense, here’s where the story of the stoplight can make each of us stop and think. The driver who stops a car length from the line has become, in my mind, a small parable of stopping short. He’s near the appointed place—the location he should be occupying. He can see the line. Everyone else can see the line. The whole intersection is arranged around the expectation that he will move to the line. And yet he sits back from it.

We all live this way on occasion in normal, everyday life.

We know we’ve done wrong, and yet, we stop short of saying it out loud. We come near to forgiving someone but stop short, preferring instead to continue rehearsing the details of the person’s offense. We see our talents and treasure and understand faithful stewardship, but we stop short of actually engaging in it. We confess God’s Word as the sole source for faith, life, and practice, but then stop short of letting that be true in our lives.

We leave gaps in so many places. For whatever reason or excuse, we sit back from the line. Meanwhile, the place of faithfulness sits in front of us, visible and empty.

Again, the skimmer, if still with us, is reading and thinking all of this could’ve been stated simply and plainly. The reader—who also happens to be the deeper thinker—knows why the stoplight story helped. And yes, this is absolutely true. Neuroscientists have long understood that readers are this world’s critical thinkers. That’s because genuine understanding that leads to betterment is a process that takes time. On the flip side, a skimmer’s chief tool is not his brain, but rather, his eyes. They use what some neuroscientists have labeled the “F” pattern of reading, which means a skimmer scans a line, then another, before scrolling down, hoping to find a word that attracts their attention. Then the process starts again. A line. Another line. Then scroll. The point is that, by default, skimmers look for things that already make sense to them. That inhibits a skimmer’s ability to grow beyond the self-protective boundaries I described earlier.

But again, readers are engaged in a longer, slower process that expands—and actually strengthens—their cognitive abilities. They’re the ones who can see the driver sitting back from the line and recognize themselves. I dare say, they’re the ones who, once they’ve felt my temptation to drive up and onto a median to pull my Jeep into the gap, can understand how the Holy Spirit fights the flesh in even the simplest moments.

That’s the benefit of storytelling. It does more than state the truth. It gives the truth room to approach. It lets the hearer live with the matter for a while. It gives the conscience time to wake up. It teaches without sounding like a scolding lecture, even when the teaching finally becomes sharp.

Jesus knew all of this before neuroscience was even a thing. That’s because He knows us. He knows that we can defend ourselves against a single sentence or meme. He knows that a story can lead us to the line before we realize where we’ve been going.

So, I will keep noticing the cars that stop too far back at red lights. I will probably keep wondering why they do it. By God’s grace, I hope to continue resisting the urge to drive my Jeep onto the median and dropping into the gap to make a point.

I’ll also keep writing this way, regardless of anyone’s criticism, if only because the world is full of little parables. Some are found in vineyards and fields. Some are found beside wounded men on roads between Jerusalem and Jericho. Some are even found at a traffic light, where someone has come toward the line and stopped short.

Again, a reader will understand. A skimmer will be irritated, and most likely, have already moved on. But if he stayed, perhaps the next time he sees that empty space at the light, he’ll think about the places where he has done the same. And for me, that’ll always be worth the extra paragraphs.

Duty Remains

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For the past thirteen years, I’ve led a monthly worship service at a care facility in Brighton. This past Tuesday, when I arrived, the room we normally use was already occupied. Before frustration could get the best of me, if only because the activities manager is no stranger to leaving me off the schedule by mistake, I returned to the front desk to ask what was happening. The woman there had a flash of memory, recalling that the facility manager was leading orientation for a group of new hires—and it would last all day.

Well, okay. So, where do I go? And who will ensure that the regular attendees can find me?

Not to worry. We sorted it out. But just a quick word about something I noticed before moving into a new space.

The room where we normally gather is set up like a movie theater. It is by no means massive, but it is large enough that distance can make a difference. When I looked in, the manager was leading the session from a chair near the front of the room, almost in the corner. The new employees were all sitting in random chairs in the very back row.

I found it both strange and humorous. She wasn’t showing a video. The projector wasn’t on, so there was no screen they needed to see from that angle. There was no obvious reason to be that far away. They had simply chosen to sit as far from the person in charge as possible. And the manager hadn’t asked them to move closer, which means they remained at least thirty feet from her while she spoke. Not to mention, they were divided by multiple rows of empty chairs. I joked with the woman at the front desk that the new hires must all be Lutherans. An elderly woman beside me volleyed that they could just as well be Baptists.

I suppose I really can’t point my finger at the people in that room. Anyone who has led a meeting or something similar has seen some version of this before. In truth, I already understand it from the participant’s perspective. Whenever I attend any sort of gathering, whether it’s a class, a conference, or whatever, I always sit in the back—and I usually sit at the end of the row. I can tell you why I do it.

Although maybe I shouldn’t. Well, I guess it’s okay.

For starters, I never quite feel like I fit in. When that’s the case, I remain on the outskirts. Second, in such gatherings, I’m more inclined to listen and learn than contribute. I can accomplish that goal well enough from a distance. Third, I don’t like people sitting behind me. I want to see everyone and everything that’s happening, especially when the gathering is informational.

All of this is to say that I’m wired to prefer participation with an escape route. I’m present, but carefully so.

So, why tell you this? On the same day that I noticed the strangeness of the orientation meeting, primary elections were held. Some things that happened after certain races were called reminded me of what I saw in the orientation meeting.

One of the more notable results from Tuesday’s primaries was that Thomas Massie lost his seat. When the results came in, social media lit up with folks upset by this, and understandably so. Regardless of how Massie is often painted by his friends or foes (and I expect plenty to pounce when they read this), he has, on the one hand, been one of the few in Washington willing to speak plainly about government spending, foreign entanglements, and the bipartisan machinery that always seems to move in the same direction, no matter who claims to be driving it. And yet, he has taken up positions that made plenty of conservatives uneasy, especially when his instincts for restraint were too much like indifference toward very real evils in the world. Add to this that he received official endorsements from groups like Code Pink, not to mention regular applause from extreme corners of the left that spend most of their time opposing nearly everything a Christian guy like me believes. For me, that made the picture less tidy than the outrage suggested.

Part of the point was that for Massie, there was plenty to admire and plenty to question. But is that not true of most who step into public life?

The point here is neither to accept nor reject Massie. I liked some of his positions. I didn’t like others. What interested me was the response from some Christians after his loss. Their disappointment became immediate resignation. Some renounced engagement in the public square altogether. Their conclusion seemed to be that Massie’s loss proved the whole enterprise was pointless. These are often the same people who warn that Trump supporters behave like cultists, as though political loyalty has swallowed up all logic and common sense. And yet, the moment their preferred candidate/leader lost, their strict devotion led to a complete recantation of political engagement altogether. That, too, is a kind of cultish response. The justification, in their minds, was that the system is obviously too corrupt, so contending in the public square is nothing but a huge waste of time.

I get the frustration. Trust me when I say that I share it on occasion. For the record, I should add I’ve never held official membership in a political party. And I never will. I hold membership in the body of Christ, and as such, my life in the public square extends from that membership. This naturally means my vote goes to the people who most closely align with the will of God as He has revealed it in His Word.

That said, I’ve been participating in elections for 36 years and have never once voted for a Democrat. My vote is always Republican. That’s because the Republican platform, and therefore most of its candidates, is still the most palatable to Christianity. The Democrat platform and its candidates are the furthest thing from anything godly in our public life. And the thing is, they really don’t even hide it. They are openly opposed to nearly everything Christianity holds sacred. That is simply where things stand. The Democrat party supports and perpetuates abortion, sexual confusion, the mutilation of children, hostility toward the natural family, and a long list of things the Bible plainly condemns.

So, what does this mean? Well, for one, a Christian doesn’t need to pretend both parties are morally equivalent in order to sound thoughtful. They are not morally equivalent. I remember back in 2021, the efforts of the Satanic Church in Texas were touted by Democrats as the best hope for stopping the Heartbeat Bill. With that, to say that in a two-party system, the Democrat Party is the one Satan aligns with best, leaving only the Republican Party as the viable choice, is by no means to endorse the Republican Party as righteous. It’s simply being honest about the choices actually before us. In every election, we are dealing with sinners, platforms, priorities, and consequences. Sometimes the choices are deeply imperfect. Sometimes one side is plainly committed to evils Christians are duty-bound to resist. When that is the case, pretending the difference is negligible is not wisdom. At best, it’s an excuse to keep one’s hands clean. Or maybe something worse, a cultish tantrum dressed up as sophistication.

At the same time, I think Christians need to remember that political faithfulness is not the same thing as political triumph. We are called to confess the truth, to love our neighbor, to defend the weak, to restrain evil where we can, and to act according to God’s Word. We are not promised that every candidate we prefer most will win. We are not promised that every righteous cause will prevail in our lifetime. We are not even promised that our efforts will be, or even appear to be, effective.

That’s where the back row at the orientation comes to mind.

I’ll admit, it is tempting to move to the back row of the public square. It’s tempting to stay technically present while keeping as much distance as possible from the discomfort of engagement—even leaving an escape route. I won’t even begin to tell you how often I consider that approach. In the back row, we can watch. We can complain. We can mutter about how bad everything has become. We can say that politics is dirty, which is true enough. We can say that the system is broken, which is also true enough. And then, when things don’t go our way, we can congratulate ourselves for being above it all.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the people who despise God’s moral and natural law will continue using the machinery of government to erase all of it, all to the inevitable harm of our society.

I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but Christians are not permitted to retreat to the seat at the end of the last row. We are citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20), and because of that, we are called to be the preeminent citizens on earth, and we do it from a seat in the center. We already know that Caesar is not Lord. But we also know that Caesar still has a sword. Here in America, we have a say in who the Caesar will be. That means we’re also responsible when the sword is used in ways that are opposite to its divine ordination—when it’s used to protect evil and punish good. No matter its use, a Christian cannot simply shrug and pretend politics has nothing to do with him.

Again, I get it. A lost primary is discouraging. It may even be clarifying. It may show us how deep certain loyalties run, how powerful certain interests are, and how easily voters can be moved by money, pressure, and personality. My point is that one election result does not release any of us from duty.

Faithfulness remains faithfulness when the results go the wrong way. Courage remains courage when our candidate loses. The unborn still need defenders. Children still need protection from predatory ideologies. Families still need advocates. Churches still need the freedom to speak, teach, gather, and serve.

Your neighbors, whether they realize it or not, still need Christians who understand that Godly citizenship does not disappear from public life the moment we experience a political setback.

I’ll always choose the back row in any physical gathering. But never in the public square. The back row in the public square may feel safer. It may even feel wiser and more virtuous for a while. But Christians have not been called to sit as far away as possible while the keynote speaker works to convince the room to hate God. We engage. We stay in the mix, letting our voices be heard and our efforts be seen.

In short, we endure.

We do so without illusions and without despair. As I already said, we may lose sometimes. We may actually lose more than we win. It was Jesus who asked His disciples rhetorically, “When the son of man returns, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). Of course, the answer to that question is yes. But the point is not lost on other categories beneath Christ’s rule, which is every category. The point is that things may get worse. But again, the results do not release us from responsibility. We are called to faithfulness. That’s it. No one in the divine spheres will ask any of us if we were applauded for our successes. But as the scriptures declare rather plainly, “it is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2). That’s the measure. The Lord has placed us here, in this moment, with these neighbors, these duties, these votes, these voices, and these opportunities.

So, we refuse the back row and take the seats that belong to us. From right in the middle of all of it, we speak the truth. We defend what is good. We resist what is evil. We serve our neighbor. We pray. We vote. We endure, even when it seems pointless. We endure even when our guy loses.

Ashtray On An Airplane? Bypass My PIN?

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The Thoma family is counting down the days until our annual Florida vacation. It’s a little over a month away. For the record: I. Can’t. Wait.

For me, it is a time of refreshment like none other, even though I’m no fan of traveling. If someone ever perfects teleportation, I’ll be first in line to invest. Step into a pod, hit a button, and step out beside a palm tree? Here, take my money.

On second thought, I just contradicted a formal Thoma decree. Florida’s distance is part of the point. Years ago, we decided as a family that vacations needed to happen somewhere far enough away that any return for a pastoral emergency would be impossible. Traverse City was too close. Florida isn’t. Once we’re in Florida, we’re there until the return flight.

Ah, the return flight. That’s the post-vacation moment God uses to help me brace for the real world. Indeed, the world shrinks around me. For example, I remember a brief conversation I had with Jen during the flight home last year. During the flight, I went to use the lavatory. I returned having noticed one of sin’s subtle fingerprints on the plane: the ashtray built into the lavatory’s folding door.

There it was in that tiny room behind the cockpit of our giant compression chamber with wings.

Before the flight even began, as the stewardess did her best to smile while demonstrating emergency instructions that no one cared to know, a voice came over the loudspeaker stating very plainly that Federal law prohibits smoking. Not to mention, there are a whole bunch of signs everywhere, most of them illuminated, telling you that smoking is prohibited. Then there are the smoke detectors above all our heads, alarms ready to scream.

Still, there’s the ridiculous ashtray tucked into the bathroom door.

There must be a practical reason for it. The only thing I can think of is that the airlines, perhaps without meaning to, have built a tiny doctrine of original sin into the lavatory door. They know people break rules. If someone is foolish enough to light up, the airline would rather the cigarette be put out in an ashtray than dropped into a trash bin full of paper towels. So, maybe the ashtray is proof of the Bible’s credibility. The airline, like the Bible, knows human beings are self-centered, addicted, defiant, and occasionally dangerous. An ashtray in an airplane makes no sense until you remember the doctrine of original sin. Then it makes perfect sense.

Come to think of it, I noticed something similar this past week while getting gas..

Essentially, no matter which gas station I use, when I pay with my debit card at the pump, there’s always an option to bypass my PIN. The same thing happens at most grocery stores. But the card has a PIN for a reason. It’s supposed to protect against unauthorized use. The whole point of the PIN is to prove that the person holding the card has knowledge only the cardholder would have. Still, if someone stole my card, he could pull into a gas station, swipe it at the pump, bypass the PIN, fill his tank, and drive away.

Unlike the ashtray, I can’t think of an explanation for this one. I only remember standing there with the nozzle in my hand, staring at the ridiculous GSTV commercial about giving the COVID vaccine to babies, and thinking, “The ‘Bypass PIN’ option sort of feels like having a deadbolt on my front door with a button beside it that says ‘Skip Deadbolt.’”

I guess what I’m saying is that some things just don’t make sense, and yet they exist anyway. I suppose one reason for this is that we’ve more than made peace with contradiction. As a pastor, I’ve met plenty of folks who insist on principles and then give wiggle room to the wants or personal preferences that negate them entirely. Truth be told, I’m guilty of such things myself. We all are.

That said, it was demonstrated in full bloom here at Our Savior last Sunday.

A woman came forward during the Lord’s Supper. Because I’d never seen her before in my life, and because the Lord’s Supper is much more than a religious snack shared among generally spiritual people, I discreetly asked at the altar, as I always do, the appropriate questions relative to participation, and when she openly admitted to being apart from what we believe, teach, and confess, I offered her a blessing and asked for a little bit of her time to chat after worship so we could talk in more detail.

I understand that many Christians come from churches where the Lord’s Supper is offered openly to anyone who comes forward. In those settings, withholding it from someone at the altar may seem unthinkable, and I understand why someone formed by that practice would be bothered. Not angry. Bothered. Still, 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 are especially important here. They teach us that Holy Communion is participation in Christ’s body and blood, and that those who commune together are also confessing something together. They also warn that eating and drinking without discernment is spiritually dangerous. That means the Lord’s Supper is never an open-ended religious gesture. It’s Christ’s gift, and because it’s Christ’s gift, pastors are called to steward it faithfully (1 Corinthians 4). That stewardship includes care for the person approaching the altar, care for the congregation gathered at the altar, and care for the confession being made at the altar.

So, again, before offering her a blessing, I asked to speak with her after worship. I did so gently. A conversation like that belongs somewhere better than a few whispered seconds at the rail. When she became angry, others nearby were gentle, too. No one tried to humiliate her. No one raised a voice at her. No one treated her with contempt. The goal was exactly what it should have been: kindness joined to faithfulness.

But she wasn’t having any of it. In her mind, she was owed the Sacrament, regardless of any reason we might give for instruction toward altar unity first.

The result? After a scene at the altar, rather than returning to her seat by way of the side aisles with the rest, she went down the center aisle alone, if only to display her anger to everyone. At her pew, she lifted her hands and called out that she had been refused communion with her God, continuing to disrupt the reverence around her.

There’s a lot wrapped up in all of this. Some of it was anger. Some of it was embarrassment. I don’t doubt for one second that she felt wronged. But why? Well, at least in part because much of American Christianity has trained people to think of the Lord’s Supper this way. If someone has been taught that the altar should receive anyone who comes forward, then a pastor’s hesitation will almost certainly feel like offense. I understand that. Still, taking offense does not mean offense was actually given. The reality is that she walked into a church whose altar she didn’t know, whose doctrine and practice she didn’t know, and whose confession she had not yet learned, and then expected the altar to operate according to assumptions carried in from the outside.

It was as though a stranger walked into someone’s house at dinnertime, sat down at the table, objected to the menu, rebuked the host, and then announced to everyone present that she had been denied what was rightly hers because they would not rewrite the order of their home to accommodate her.

That sounds absurd in ordinary life. And yet, in American Christianity, it seems to happen all the time.

Open or closed communion is not necessarily the point here. Although I should at least say that the churches practicing open communion usually recognize some boundary, even if they draw it differently. Suppose a pastor knew beforehand that someone intended to receive the bread and wine only to throw them on the floor and trample them. I doubt many would actually say, “Well, if he comes forward, I have to commune him.” At that point, the issue would be obvious. The pastor would guard the Lord’s Supper against open contempt. My point is not that every case is that blatant. Most are not. My point is simply that once we admit the Lord’s Supper can be profaned, the pastoral question is no longer whether reverent boundaries may exist. The question is where those boundaries belong, and whether the pastor is willing to bear the burden of applying them faithfully.

I suppose another point here is that, on the other end of the exchange, too many have been trained to believe that individual sincerity outranks truth, desire outranks doctrine, and personal offense outweighs pastoral responsibility. We have been trained to think that anything with the name “Jesus” on it is automatically boundaryless. And if it does have boundaries—things a worshipping community may have in place to prevent profaning Christ—then those boundaries are automatically loveless and offensive. We have been trained to imagine the Church as a spiritual convenience store, open to everyone on each person’s preferred terms.

That’s like a “Bypass PIN” option at the gas pump. It makes very little sense to me, and yet, it exists anyway. A person can say, “This is communion with God,” and then become furious when the pastor takes seriously what God has said about His meal. A person can say, “This matters deeply,” and then refuse the very care that proves the Church actually agrees with the statement. In other words, we say the thing is serious, and then we resent the safeguards that seriousness requires, acting as though doctrines are rude whenever they slow us to self-inspection and the possibility that we could be wrong.

One of the biggest itches in my craw is that so many say they want churches to stand for something, only to be shocked when we do. But the thing is, they’re really only shocked because the stance affected them personally.

You should know, she took me up on the offer to chat after worship.

Most people who are unhappy with our practice usually go through the greeting line, tell me what a rotten person I am, and then leave. She stood off to the side and waited. I did my best to speak calmly about what God’s Word says, and why what I did was an act of care rather than cruelty.

But again, she was having none of it, thereby demonstrating one more contradiction.

She stayed to chat. But like so many in our culture who claim to want discussion, when the time came for it, the “Skip Dialogue” button was pressed, and she talked over me, doing her best to lather me in condemnation and insults. I barely got a few sentences out. Instead, I was tongue-lashed by someone who wanted order, so long as it was her order. She wanted a church with an altar, but that altar could not be misaligned with what she already believed about altars.

So, why am I telling you these things? Well, for starters, you should know this isn’t necessarily an unfamiliar experience. It does happen more than people know, just not necessarily to this degree. I suppose I’m also sharing it because, at a minimum, it’s time, once again, to remind folks that the Church is not a restaurant where the customer is always right. The pastor is not a waiter taking custom orders. Above all—and recognizing that other Christians order this differently—my Synod, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, believes the Lord’s Supper is sacred in a way that requires altar fellowship to be taken seriously. Sacred things require reverence, and reverence requires pastors and congregations to ground the Lord’s Supper in faithful practices born of God’s Word rather than in the increasingly common internet-assembled expectations of whoever happens to approach the altar.

This is where the theological lesson in all of this becomes unavoidable. We need to realize that sin does more than make people bad. It also makes us incoherent. It teaches us to demand gifts while rejecting the giver’s terms. It teaches us to call something holy while treating it like it isn’t. It teaches us to interpret pastoral care as hatred.

I think I just figured out why the PIN bypass option exists. Again, when you remember the nature of sin, these things make sense. The PIN bypass exists because the world wants what it wants. For businesses, in most cases, it’s profit. To get at your dollars, most businesses prefer convenience. Convenience often wins the argument before security even gets to speak. Scenes like the one that happened last Sunday prove the same thing. Any obstacle to personal preference is inconvenient. A person with this mindset will only ever see a pastor as hateful when he says, “I need to speak with you first, because what’s happening here is far too precious to be handled carelessly.”

Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in. It’s even more unfortunate that anger can rise so quickly when a pastor is trying to be pastoral. Still, the pastor’s task remains what it has always been. We preach Christ crucified. We call sinners to repentance. We give the gifts as Christ instituted them. We guard what He has entrusted to His Church. We speak gently when gentleness is possible, and we remain faithful even when gentleness is mistaken for hate. We do this because, in the end, we already know that the real contradiction at the heart of all this is, quite simply, us. Sinners want God near enough for comfort, but also far enough away to leave us in charge.

The thing is, the Christian Faith doesn’t actually allow that arrangement. Christ draws near on His terms. And because He is no divine pushover, letting anyone do whatever he or she wants with His things, He also doesn’t ordain undershepherds to accommodate terms other than what Christ has established. That’s not cruelty on Christ’s part. That’s not cruelty on the pastor’s part, either. That’s care. One would hope that even an atom-sized splinter of Christian humility would be enough to help any of us press “Pause” instead of “Bypass” before assuming that a church’s reverent boundary is an act of cruelty.

What Else Is There To Say?

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I did a quick calculation this morning. I’ve done the calculation before, if only to remember how long it’s been.

Essentially, I looked back into the folders where I keep all these Sunday morning eNews messages. The first folder is labeled “2015.” However, there really should be a 2014 folder, too, because there are five in there that belong to the previous year.

Doing the math, that means that this coming November, I’ll have maintained this weekly practice for twelve years straight, never once missing a Sunday, even during the Thoma family’s two-week vacation. Every year on vacation, I tell myself I’m not going to do it. But then I do, anyway.

Well, that changes this year. Yeah, right. But I mean it this time. Okay, let’s just wait and see.

This morning’s note is number 654. Again, looking at the date of the very first one, and then doing a little math, it seems I’ve written a good number more than a year allows. That’s because I’ve also been writing them for special days throughout the year. For example, I write something at Thanksgiving. I write one on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas Day. Things like that. When there are national tragedies, I try to observe and then say something worthwhile—something that can nudge a reader toward Christ. We’ve had our fair share of those in the last twelve years.

The COVID years never seemed to run dry of one’s need to observe critically through the Gospel’s lens.

But whether or not anything I’ve ever scribbled has been worth anyone’s while, at some point along the way, these little jaunts became less an opportunity to communicate about a particular topic and more a habit. And by habit, I not only mean the nagging urge to type something, but also the urge to observe the world in a certain way and do what I can to bring others into that observation.

I’ve said it before. There’s always something going on. A person needs only to open his eyes and look around. We live in a world that is both wonderful and foolish all at the same time. How a person prefers to interpret what’s seen is another question altogether. I suppose in a sense, this weekly habit—my clinical need to lift the looking glass of God’s Word to my eyes, sweep the moment’s horizon, and then describe the details for public consumption—has been a way for my habit to shape the habits of others.

Habits—good ones—are necessary, especially when the world’s darker things impose. I suppose that’s one of the strange benefits of good habits. In a way, they carry us when we can’t carry ourselves. They’re there to help put things in order when chaos threatens the moment.

For example, here I am at 654. I’ve scanned the morning’s horizon. What did the world impose? What chaos loomed?

A seven-year-old girl, Athena Strand, was kidnapped and murdered in Texas by a FedEx driver, Tanner Horner, who came to her home with a delivery. He saw her, and when no one was looking, he took her.

The images from the delivery truck’s interior dash cam video are dreadful, even though the ones I’ve seen don’t show the murder itself. One in particular shows her on her knees behind him in the narrow space between the cab and the packages, small enough to be hidden there, looking over his shoulder with a face that still belonged to childhood. To me, she seems caught between confusion and trust, as though some part of her was still trying to understand whether this was strange or frightening, whether she had won an unexpected contest, and the prize was a ride in a FedEx truck, or she was actually being carried past the last safe moment of her life. Her hair, her posture, the helpless nearness to the man driving her away—it all makes the scene almost unbearable. He was taking her toward a dreadful end, and she was still too young to know how terrified she needed to be.

Horner was sentenced to death by lethal injection last week. This does not bother me. There will be time between the verdict and the needle for the kind of forgiveness that can preserve Horner through mortality and into immortality. Let’s hope that happens while understanding that such hope feels foreign to our human sense. And so, in the meantime, let the government’s sword be removed from its sheath and wielded as God has ordained (Romans 13:4), lest more monsters act on the urge to do what Horner has done.

Beyond these things, it’s stories like these that make commentary feel useless. What is there to say after all this? What sentence can bear the weight of a seven-year-old child taken while playing in her driveway? What moral observation can see clearly enough through the fog of a little girl being abducted, violated, strangled, and dumped like trash a few miles from the safety of her home? What polished paragraph can stand near her mother and father, people who’ve had to keep breathing in a world where their daughter no longer does?

Some people reach for words because silence feels a lot like surrender. Still, in certain circumstances, it feels as though human language fails us miserably because some evils are just too plain for explanation. Some things that happen don’t need analysis or interpretation. They need tears. They need the kind of groaning St. Paul says creation has been doing since the fall (Romans 8:22).

A little girl is dead. A family is shattered. A man has been condemned. And all the world’s surrounding talk feels tritely thin.

That said, I humbly suggest we let the habit carry us here. When we do—when the lens is lifted—we may not fully understand what happened, but we’ll at least see it clearly. If anything, we’ll get a sense of just how different the Christian faith is from the world’s sentiment. The Christian faith—established by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel—is incapable of pretending evil is smaller than it is. It certainly doesn’t try to convince the believer that every tragedy is secretly beautiful if we just look at it from the right angle. Personally, a little bit of crazy stirs in me when the best anyone can offer to moments like these is that everything happens for a reason.

Yeah, okay. That’s not helpful. But then again, the world is ridiculous that way.

The Word of God observes these things and calls them what they are. It sees death and calls it an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). It beholds murder and describes it as an act that screams to God from the ground (Genesis 4:10). It sees children and then warns against their harm, reminding ill-minded adults that their angels always see the face of the Father in heaven (Matthew 18:6 &10). It looks at dreadfulness and says God does not hold the guilty guiltless (Exodus 34:7 and Nahum 1:3).

And then, suddenly, right in the middle of all of it, it points us to a cross.

Why would it do this? Because the cross is where God shows us that He is serious about sin, death, and the devil’s awful and seemingly never-ending creativity (Hebrews 2:14-15 and 1 John 3:8). The cross doesn’t make evil less evil. It reveals how deep the evil goes. The Son of God is betrayed, mocked, beaten, condemned, and killed. Innocence is nailed to wood. The world does what the world does, and God takes all of it into Himself.

Then, on the third day, Jesus rises. That’s what matters most in situations like this. And only through the Gospel’s lens can this be seen. Only through Christ and His complete and perfect work, ultimately proven by His resurrection, can we take one more breath through moments that feel like all the earth’s oxygen suddenly dissipated into space. It has to matter in situations like this, or it doesn’t matter anywhere.

If Easter is only for clean grief and manageable sadness, it’s way too small. If the resurrection is as the world is minimally willing to consider it—a springtime metaphor—then it has nothing to say beside a child’s grave. Or, if Christ is raised merely to improve our mood, so that we can say things like, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” then He is useless in the face of real horrors.

But Christ is risen from the dead.

That means death doesn’t get the final word over Athena Strand. It doesn’t get the final word over the tears of her family. It doesn’t get the final word over the courtroom, the sentence, the headlines, or the long years of grief that remain after everyone else stops reading.

The final word belongs to the One who said, “Let the little children come to me” (Mark 10:14). It belongs to the One whose hands still bear the wounds of what human beings do to the innocent (John 20:27).

Admittedly, even those words don’t make the grief tidy. I can promise you that. I’ve never shared them at a funeral and seen all the tears suddenly dry up. But it doesn’t change the fact that they’re Gospel words, and only the Gospel truly soothes (whether or not we realize it) in moments of sadness and anger, and during times of rage. In fact, it’s the Gospel that gives  Christians permission to weep. The Lord sanctified our tears when He cried at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:33-36). The Gospel reminds Christians that they are also allowed to want justice (Psalm 10:17-18 and Revelation 6:10). And while doing so, the Gospel calls for Christians to know they are more than permitted to cry out in the face of this world’s atrocities, “How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1 and Revelation 6:10).

God gave us those words because He knew we’d need them. They’re meant to be spoken often. Indeed, they make for a good habit of words—the kind we need when it feels like there isn’t anything worth saying. Because often, there just isn’t.

And so, the Church’s habits emerge from God’s Word. We pray. We confess. We sing. We gather. We speak the Creed. We hear the Word. We eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. We bury our dead in hope. We say “Lord, have mercy” when there’s nothing left to say in the presence of grief.

Considering the story I shared, the only thing left worth saying is Lord, have mercy on Athena’s family. Lord, bring justice to the wicked. Lord, protect the little ones. Lord, grant us faith to hold fast to you, even as you hold fast to us. And Lord, please, come quickly (Revelation 22:20).

No Right to Complain If You Don’t Engage

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A few years back, maybe six or seven years ago, a member here at Our Savior (or, I should say, former member) approached me to let me know in his passive-aggressive way that my friend Charlie Kirk had been listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Extremist Files.” In response, I gleefully pointed out that while Charlie himself had not yet received such a badge of honor, his organization, TPUSA, had indeed made SPLC’s “Hate Map” as an “anti-government extremist group.”

That particular conversation, like so many with him before it, did not end well, especially since I implied that being targeted by the SPLC, a group that claims to fight racial hatred, could be a good thing.

But I meant every word.

I wonder what my former friend’s thoughts are now that the SPLC’s guts have been exposed. Although I may be getting a little ahead of myself. Have you even heard the news?

If not, the essentials are that the Department of Justice leveled three charges against the SPLC, namely, wire fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. It seems that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC’s leadership secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money to racist extremist groups, most notably, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as other neo-Nazi groups. I just read some of Todd Blanche’s comments on the situation. He’s the acting Attorney General. In summary, he put it rather bluntly, saying the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

I tried not to laugh when I read his words. Most reasonable people who’ve ever crossed paths with the SPLC already knew that. Charlie certainly did. That’s because it’s an easily discernible M.O. for most of the groups out there claiming to fight racial inequality. In fact, it’s written into the DNA of almost any progressive protest you see on the news. From BLM to “No Kings” to LGBTQ, Inc., the only way these groups have managed to stay in business is to ensure that the “hatred” angle relative to their particular organization’s needs persists. And so, that’s what they do. They foment rage.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that other organizations, like the ones I’ve named, have been doing the same thing the SPLC has been doing. Of course, the SPLC denies the charges. Still, it’s not looking good for them. It’s becoming undeniably plain that the SPLC, which raised money by warning Americans about hate, was shelling out major cash to keep the machinery of hate in motion.

Wow. Shocking.

As I said before, most reasonable people already knew the SPLC to be less a sober civil-rights watchdog and more a moral-licensing agency. It has always acted with an assumed authority to decide who was hateful, who was dangerous, who belonged on the outside of acceptable society, and perhaps worst of all, who needed to be marked for public suspicion, all toward the goal of organic cancellation. Of course, to remain somewhat veritable, the usual suspects, like the KKK, were tagged. In the meantime, the rest of SLPC’s cash was being spent tagging and fighting against Christians, conservatives, and a whole host of ordinary people who held unfashionable views about marriage, gender, education, immigration, or religious liberty.

I suppose that’s what happens when an organization discovers that condemnation can become a business model. The more standards it can create and identify as hate, the more necessary it becomes to fight that hate. The longer its list of enemies grows—the more fear it creates—the more urgently it can ask donors for money.

But again, I say sarcastically, “Wow. Shocking.” That’s because none of this was lost on reasonable people—or at least the people paying attention. And I don’t offer those words lightly, especially to the folks here in Michigan. There’s an angle to this that requires some attention because it lands very close to home.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current Secretary of State and a candidate for governor, served on the SPLC board during the time period covered by the indictment. She was named to the board of directors in 2014. Her campaign has publicly confirmed that she served for four years. That does not, by itself, prove what she knew or when she knew it. Still, the indictment accuses leadership. That includes the board.

I suppose one thought here is that if someone seeks the governorship of Michigan, then that person’s associations and moral discernment should matter. I’m the Executive Director for an organization. My role exists alongside a board of directors. That board isn’t a ceremonial thing. It exists for governance. It exists for accountability. It exists to understand the organization’s mission, finances, and a whole host of other matters that help ensure the effort is acting faithfully and lawfully.

Now, having said all this, a seemingly random thought must be considered.

Not long after that image of Trump was shared—the one in which he looked an awful lot like Jesus stretching out his hand to heal someone—I read plentiful commentary from fellow Christians on social media saying things like, “This is exactly why Christians need to stay out of politics. The separation of Church and State!”

I get the aversion to the image. Regardless of Trump’s wobbly explanation, it was ridiculous. But it’s precisely because Christians have adopted that kind of retreat that organizations like the SPLC continue to get as far as they do. Yes, there are foolish and cringeworthy things that our elected officials do in the public square. But the answer to these things is never political indifference, or worse, monasticism. It’s never to leave the arena, leaving the gates open, and allowing the lions to feast on whatever they prefer.

It’s true, the government is not the Church. It cannot preach the Gospel, administer the Sacraments, or forgive sins. It cannot make Christians. Only Christ does that through the means He has established. But the government is still Christ’s servant for earthly order (Romans 13:1–4). It is still given to punish evil and protect the neighbor. And when people who hate Christ, hate His design, hate His Word, and hate anyone who confesses His truth, are the only ones willing to enter the public square, willfully disengaged Christians should not complain when the public square becomes hostile to the things of God.

On the contrary, Christians must get in the game and push back. At a minimum, that means Christians cannot shrug at elections. Even more importantly, we cannot simply vote for president while neglecting the midterms, or worse, our local elections. In fact, I’d be willing to say that the folks in charge of the local library or the people elected to your local school board matter more than anyone may realize. Even there, a Christian cannot pretend that a candidate’s beliefs and alliances will have no bearing on our lives. They do, and in the most immediately impactful ways. A school board candidate who sat on the board for an organization that believes 2 plus 2 equals 7 is not someone you want spearheading a community’s educational efforts.

And yet, concerning even greater, more life-altering things, there remain those Christians who sprinkle so foolishly across social media, “Stay out of it! God will handle it!” Those Christians absolutely own the blame when their community’s children cannot do simple math.

Yes, God will handle it. He’ll handle it through your vocation as a citizen, upholding your God-given responsibilities (Jeremiah 29:7 and Matthew 22:21). He’ll bless His world through your faithfulness, which is already something He works in us by the power of the Holy Spirit for faith. We’re already inclined to do what He wants. When we vote, we’ll be inclined to seek candidates who most closely align with Him and His Word.

In this day and age, that pretty much means choosing leaders who protect life, embrace natural law, honor the family, respect religious liberty, and understand the limits of government in light of Two Kingdoms theology.

By the way, Christians engage in the process, recognizing that no candidate will be perfect. No election will usher in the kingdom of God. And anyone who believes these things has lost grip on what the Word of God teaches. For those who hold to God’s Word, they’ll know, by faith, that Christ has already won the victory that no ballot can win (1 Corinthians 15:57 and Colossians 2:15). He lives and reigns now, and His kingdom will have no end (Luke 1:33).

They’ll also know that until He returns, we live here. We serve our neighbors here. We raise our children here. We confess the truth here. And part of that earthly calling is to engage in the public square in ways that not only protect what’s Godly, but also to act with wisdom to preserve it. One of the most powerful ways to do that is in the voting booth.

So, returning somewhat to where I began, I’d encourage you to pay attention. Do some reading. Don’t skim. Read. This is an important way to measure candidates against the Christian Faith, namely, the Word of God. Campaign slogans won’t tell you anything. Not anything of real value, that is. Most would never have learned about Jocelyn Benson’s association with the SPLC had certain folks not dug deeper and written in ways that exposed it.

Read up on it. Also, study the candidates’ voting records. Read their speeches. Look into their associations. Doing even these things, it won’t be hard to figure out who’s who.

Then, as a Christian, take that “who’s who” stuff into the voting booth and flex the muscle of your responsibility. Because if you can, but don’t, as I said before, you have no reason to complain.

Jesus Is the Way Out

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I’ll just warn you before I even get started this morning that my eyes are already tired and my brain is already fried. For those who may or may not care, I have started writing the sequel to Ashes to Ashes. I’ve been working on it off and on since October of last year. But by “working on it,” I mean tapping at it in between a thousand other things.

At this point, I have twenty-five good chapters of what already feels like it’ll be forty or more by the time I’m done. But as I already hinted, to do any of the work necessary to the story at any other time of the year than during summer’s only slightly accommodating pace is to invite a kind of mental collapse I am less and less equipped to survive as I get older.

I’m sure the other pastors out there reading my words know exactly what I mean. Seemingly, billions of big and small demands of ordinary vocation take up the better part of whatever strength many of us have to give in any particular day. And by the time morning comes around again, there’s usually enough left in me to do the work in front of me, though rarely enough to disappear into another world and bring back pages from it.

Add to the calculus that I’m relatively new to the fiction genre. It certainly doesn’t come about as easily as stuff like this. With this, I don’t have to plan. I just have to type. And with that, I can do a lot in a short period of time. I can’t do that with a story. Well, I suppose I could. But I can assure you it wouldn’t be any good.

I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. For starters, I’m assuming most fiction writers know that no matter what their original ideas might be before starting, they’ll almost certainly change as the work unfolds. I’ve learned that a story has a way of revealing itself. I heard Joe Rogan talk about his best creativity occurring in an almost disconnected way, describing it as something that happens apart from his intentions, steered more so by a “muse.”

That may or may not be true. Well, whatever.

In my world, it just seems like the characters press forward, themes deepen, certain scenes, once their details start forming, they arrive carrying more weight than I actually anticipated. Some come to mind while driving or eating lunch. Some arrived while I was mowing the yard this weekend. Sometimes the ideas translate into more pages. Sometimes it means I wrote way too much and, even though I might like it, I have to delete it.

That’s where I am right now—when I have the time.

Again, for those who may or may not care, much like the first installment, this one is being built in part from a playlist of songs. I’ll likely include that playlist somewhere near the beginning in a preface. I’ve already included some quotations from a few at the beginning of a few chapters. I may or may not keep them there. Just like Ashes to Ashes, the songs I’m listening to now do more than provide background noise while I write. They help form the register of the story. This time around, most of them are rock songs, and they fit this particular novel because they capture the lead character’s inner turmoil while, in some cases, also giving a sense of the force and movement behind what he does. You don’t need me to tell you that a song—a combination of music and lyrics—can sometimes say in three or four minutes what it takes fifteen pages to tell. It can carry anger, grief, memory, longing, and self-destruction all at once.

One song in particular attached itself to the work early on. In fact, it landed on me a month or two after I finished Ashes to Ashes. It’s “Rise” by The Cult.

I love rock music. But in all honesty, I was never a fan of that band. Also, I didn’t necessarily intend to write a sequel. But then other things started happening—and then I happened upon that song—and Daniel Michaels’ return almost felt inevitable. If you listen to the song, especially its chorus, I think you’ll get a sense for the book’s faster pulse.

Imagine a man surrounded in an alley. He’s been tricked into the space by some very bad people. Still, he’s the only one who makes it out. The song will give you such a character in motion.

If you’re listening to the song while a familiarity with Reverend Daniel Michaels is wandering around in your brain, you’ll hear a terrible kind of resolve gathering into purpose. You’ll see that dark alley, and you’ll sense that he’s coming, and he can’t be stopped. Again, it’s the chorus that does it for me.

“It’s the way that you feel. It’s the truth in your eye. ’Cuz you’re up against the world, and still you rise.”

By themselves, the words don’t quite fill in the gaps. You need the music, too. When you get a chance, listen to the song, especially if you know the character. It’ll be a foretaste of the energy driving the action you can expect.

But there’s also something more than action in what you’re hearing. There’s a sense of determination. Listen for it. I suppose the determination part is what matters most to me. Where is a person’s determination aimed?

When a question like that is asked, the Christian understanding of humanity doesn’t permit shallow explanations. That’s because we know better than to divide sin from its potential. We know we’re not dealing with minor flaws and manageable wounds. We’re dealing with a diseased heart capable of the worst kinds of destruction. Once that truth is understood, a story moving through darkness cannot be treated as merely a tale of heroes and villains. The man at the center of the story may hate evil for the right reasons and still become entangled in evil by the way he deals with it.

Among other things, I’m interested in that. But not only that. I’m also interested in the possibility of a trajectory toward something better. I say “trajectory” because stories like this are rarely about clean transformations. While I’m not necessarily new to reading stories like this, again, I’m fairly new to creating them, and I’ve learned they’re about collision, pressure, realization, and maybe even mercy arriving where mercy seemed all but impossible. They’re about humanity falling far enough into the habitual nature of darkness that we wonder if there are any real roads back from it all.

As a person who also writes sermons for a living, it’s nearly impossible for me to do any of this without noticing God’s Word standing somewhere in the background. God’s Word names things truthfully. It exposes and accuses and strips away all excuses. It tells the truth about evil in the world and the truth about evil within the “self.” That’s God’s Law doing its thing. But that’s not all there is to God’s Word. The Gospel is there, too, and it does something the Law cannot do. It shows us Christ. And as it does, it forgives and restores. It raises those who are dead in their trespasses and sins to new life—no matter who they are or what they’ve done.

The Gospel gives us Jesus. He’s the road out.

I don’t mean to sound vain, but I think what makes what I’ve written a little better than the Hallmark Channel type Christian fiction stuff that’s out there is that I’m willing to let the Law do its work. I’m more willing to let sin appear in its fuller ugliness than the folks at Angel Studios. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong for what they’re doing. I’m just saying I don’t want to rush past the damage people do to one another and to themselves without the reader sensing humanity’s genuine need for rescue. At the same time, I want to tease out how the Gospel might address those scenarios in real time. Because that’s where we live—in real dreadfulness in real time.

That, to me, is where the real weight of the better stories lives. Human struggle means more when sin is treated seriously, and redemption means more when mercy reaches someone who has no clean way of rescuing himself.

As you can imagine, I’ve re-read Ashes to Ashes several times while working on all this, if only to maintain the world and its style. Admittedly, the first book already carried these tensions in seed form. This sequel pushes them further. The darkness is deeper here. The wounds have been around a lot longer. Plenty of other things have happened, giving Daniel’s condition more time to harden. He carries grief and guilt, and I suppose also a grim sense of obligation, and all of it presses him forward in ways that are destructive even though he’s convinced himself they are necessary. He’s trying to answer evil. He’s trying to set things right. He’s trying, in his own damaged way, to act against what should never have been allowed to flourish in the first place. And yet, there it is, in all its ugliness. And when Daniel sees it, sometimes it’s more like looking in a mirror than observing through a window.

But that’s not at all where I want this story to end. With that, I’ll use the word “trajectory” again. Daniel’s trajectory must be one of hope. People should sense hope’s presence.

What I mean is that the strength of any good character (if the character is being written within genuine humanity’s honest boundaries in mind) won’t rest in his ability to think his way back into decency through sheer force of will. If that’s where the character’s hope is located, there’d be very little reason for hope at all, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I suppose that’s where the author, who is also a pastor, can benefit the story most. I can keep these things in mind, remembering that real hope rests where it has always rested: in the mercy of God in Christ, who still speaks into dead places and calls them back to life.

In other words, if there is any road out for a man like Daniel Michaels, it’ll have to be given to him. It will have to come from outside of him. It will have to arrive as mercy does, undeserved and unearned, but real all the same. And it’ll be located firmly in Jesus.

And so, wherever any of this finally goes, and however dark some of its roads may become along the way, I hope it’ll be hard to miss that even for someone as wounded and lost as Daniel, redemption is never out of reach, not with Christ.

That’s enough rambling for today.

The Cause for Life is Advancing

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I sure hope you don’t start reading this morning’s note and think, “Oh no, here he goes again.” That said, and while I know we’re well into spring, I heard on the way into the office this morning that it could snow tonight.

Ugh. Snow belongs to winter. And anyone who knows me well knows that I despise winter. I know the comment is trite. But I mean it. And it feels like I can’t say it enough. Winter is the worst.

Why do I live in Michigan? I blame my wife, Jennifer. I met her here in 1994. It was then, and only then, that Michigan laid claim to me. Well, on second thought, it’s more accurate to say that I’m here because this is where the Lord sent me. With that, Michigan’s grip extends through the hands of God’s people here at Our Savior in Hartland.

So, again, why do I live in Michigan? I suppose, because it’s where I belong.

But none of what I just said changes the fact that I thoroughly dislike Michigan’s seemingly endless winters. And I don’t mean that in the casual way people complain about a gray day or a cold morning. I mean that I can barely get to December’s midpoint before winter has already dragged on long enough for me. I practically crawl through and into the new year carrying every ounce of its emotional weight. Everything appears dead. Everything living has, almost literally, withdrawn into itself—and I’m miles past my threshold. I’m dying for warmth. I want summer’s colors.

Did I mention that it could snow tonight?

For the record, if you happen to see me standing in tonight’s potential snow and talking to myself with a stick in my hand, I’m not actually talking to myself, but I’m poking at the earth and saying, “Wake up!”

Of course, spring will eventually arrive. Technically, it began this year on March 20. As you can see, it didn’t arrive all at once. Admittedly, however, it started with signs. The ground softened. We started getting more daylight. I went for a short walk on Wednesday evening in between rain showers with my grandson, Preston, and along the way, I showed him the small green things beginning to press up through the earth. I lifted him near a neighbor’s tree to show him the buds appearing on branches. Those branches looked dead a week ago.

I suppose in another sense, spring is also messy. Anything messy is rarely spectacular by the world’s standards. But for me, the signs matter more than the mess. For me, they testify to life. They tell me that summer is coming. In a grander sense, they’re a reminder that what appeared dead was not beyond renewal.

I should mention that while spring is hopeful, it also brings its own kind of trouble for me. The extreme barometric pressure swings that come with the season always bring migraines. In other words, even in the season that finally feels like relief, there’s an element of pain. But there, again, is a lesson for me as I wait for summer. In a sense, spring tells the truth about growth. Life’s return is a beautiful thing. But it’s also messy, and often enough, struggle is a part of its process (Romans 8:22).

I’m thinking in this way this morning for a reason.

I spoke at the Lenawee County Right To Life dinner in Adrian this past Thursday, and, essentially, some of my remarks focused on how easy it can be to become discouraged in the middle of any long moral struggle. Discouragement settles in slowly, and after a while, all the surrounding winter-like noise can easily become mistaken for seasonal permanence. Relative to the cause for life, if folks aren’t careful, especially in the ungodly state of Michigan, it can eventually feel like the cultural winds only blow in one direction, and that the best anyone can ever expect is to brace for things to get worse. Over time, that kind of discouragement can become its own form of surrender. People continue doing the work outwardly while inwardly assuming that nothing will ever change.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the presence of struggle doesn’t mean that nothing is growing. And spring itself is the perfect reminder. It’s messy, but even in the mess, there are signs of growth showing that, no matter the noise or the seemingly slow pace, the work is bearing fruit (Galatians 6:9).

I saw a few of those signs in real time on Thursday evening in Adrian. The evening itself is not necessarily the point here. The point is what the evening suggested. At the start of the dinner, the Lenawee County affiliate president, Julie, mentioned that the event had grown from 20 to 25 tables. That means forty more seats were filled than the year before. That’s 25 percent growth. I know those are some relatively simple numbers. But it’s a relatively simple story to tell. In short, more people came. More people wanted to participate. Most importantly, in a time when people are shunned for taking stands against abortion’s ungodliness, more people were willing to attach themselves publicly to the cause of life.

That alone is a spring-like bud on the cause’s tree.

During the dinner, Jennifer and I sat beside Amber Roseboom, the president of Michigan Right to Life. I’ve known Amber for a while now. I mentioned a statistic I’d read recently in passing. It was from Gallup’s 2025 age-trend data on abortion. One number in particular stood out. Among Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine, 37 percent identified as pro-life. At first glance, we might think that’s an abysmal number. And yet, in 2022, that number was 26 percent. That’s an eleven-point increase.

I ended up sharing that statistic during my talk, if only because nobody should pretend that an eleven-point shift in a younger age bracket is meaningless drift. It’s a sign of spring. It suggests an emerging openness. If anything, it suggests that younger Americans are not as uniform in their thinking as so many in our culture insist.

Interestingly, Amber mentioned both in private and during her moment at the microphone that the Michigan affiliates are growing. All of these details—the table count, the percentage increase, and the affiliate increase—together hint at a pattern. They suggest that the cause of life is not in retreat. It’s not even just barely holding the line. It’s advancing.

For far too long, the culture has spoken as though the rising generation belonged almost entirely among abortion’s defenders. They’ve treated that assumption as a settled fact, like it’s some sort of already rendered verdict, and that only the backwater idiots are the ones failing to recognize it. For my part, I try never to forget that human beings are far more complicated than the scripts the culture writes for them. Not to mention, God made us. His Law written into our hearts is still a thing. His natural law is still a thing, too. And so, the sight of vulnerable life still stirs something in people. The moral weight of what abortion actually is, when presented truthfully, still bears down on hearts and minds, even when every available euphemism is deployed to soften the reality. Younger people, like every other generation before them, are still capable of seeing through lies and changing their minds.

I appreciate Albert Camus’ famous saying, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Some consider it overused. I don’t see it that way. I think the words are a near-perfect description of hope. Relative to what I’ve written so far, in the seemingly perpetual dreadfulness of abortion’s winter, they speak of hope’s presence, and they anticipate hope’s emerging buds. A local dinner grows by 25 percent. State affiliates increase. Younger adults show a measurable increase in pro-life identification. Each sign by itself may seem small to someone determined to dismiss it. But like a grampa lifting his grandson to the tree to see for himself, God does the same with us on occasion. He lifts His children to these small signs and encourages us, “Keep going. Summer is coming.”

For Christians, I suppose this hope reaches even deeper still, especially so close to Easter. By faith, we know our hope is already fulfilled in Christ. He has already entered death and shattered it from the inside. He has already secured the victory over sin, death, and hell by His cross and resurrection. Which means every small sign of life, every bud of renewal, and every encouragement along the way arrives to us as more than wishful thinking. They come as reminders of a future already guaranteed by the risen Lord (1 Corinthians 15:20). Indeed, summer is coming because Christ is risen, and in Him the final spring has already begun.

With that knowledge tucked into our hearts, we can endure the lingering cold, keep watch for the buds, and go about the business of defending life, assured that the Lord who has promised the summer is already bringing it.