September 1

How are you today? No, seriously — how are you today, September 18, 2025? It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

Another killing. Another mass shooting. More fighting in Ukraine. More violence in the Middle East. More angry words. More division. More polarization.

I’m hurting. Frustrated. Hopeless. Sad — a sadness that sits heavy in my chest and breaks my heart. I’ve known deep sadness before (losing my dad at nineteen, losing my mother to colon cancer, a divorce after twenty years), but this sadness feels different: communal, corrosive, and slow.

I’m not sad because we disagree. I’m sad because I can’t see a way out. I’m sad because we’ve sunk to the point where the goal of disagreement is the moral annihilation of the other. It isn’t a partisan failing alone — both sides now use words like fascist, dictator, murderer, Nazi, un-American as blunt instruments of dehumanization.

We draw lines and dare anyone to cross them. We hear, but we do not listen. We listen only long enough to prepare our next blow. We are told that “if we love enough all will be well,” but love without honesty and courage is not a cure. We are asked to forgo our convictions to form a fragile, performative unity — to pretend peace by pretending disagreement away. That’s not how it works.

I am sad because we’ve dragged Jesus into all this as if he were a partisan flag. Some claim him as proof that their side is right; others, that theirs is the only faithful position. He refuses those lines. He upends them.

I am sad. And I don’t know what the next honest step is. But I do know two small things: first, grief named is better than grief denied; second, if we are to have any chance of getting out of this, it will begin with listening that is not strategy but an act of courage. Can we try that — to listen not to win, but to be known, to be genuinely understood and to at least try to understand?