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A Country Pastor, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C., DC (2026)

A simple Jesus-Christian country pastor sharing God’s love from farm life to faith through Jesus’ lens for compassion, justice, & stewardship, guided by God’s unrelenting grace to stand up for the least of thee with Jesus as the forgiving judge, not man❤️

09/05/2026

Taken for Granted: Those Who Build This Country & Those Who Die for It
By A Country Pastor

Do you ever feel like you're being taken for granted? Or does the world just keep telling you that you're not doing enough, even while it's the one taking advantage of you?

Labor Day is a couple of days away, and it deserves better than a cookout and a mattress sale standing in for what the day was actually built to protect. The people who build this country and the people who die defending it keep getting treated the same way by the ones in power over them. They get used. They get praised in a speech. And then they get taken for granted the moment it costs anything to actually honor them.

Being taken for granted does not always look like cruelty. Most of the time it looks like praise that never turns into a paycheck. A worker gets called essential during a crisis, and then the raise never comes once the crisis passes. A soldier gets called a hero at a parade, and then gets sent overseas without the equipment or the plan that hero actually needed to come home safe. Both are being used for what they provide while nobody ever really asks what they need in return. Scripture has a name for that, and it is not a flattering one. It calls it treating a human being as an instrument instead of a person made in the image of God, and it condemns that every single time it shows up.

Start with labor, since Labor Day gives us the excuse to think about it. Rest was never supposed to be something we had to earn or beg for. God rested on the seventh day of creation, not out of exhaustion but because rest itself belonged inside a good and finished world from the very start (Genesis 2:2-3). Jesus later told a crowd who had turned rest into another burden that the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath (Mark 2:27). Rest exists to serve us. We were never created to serve endless labor, no matter how many times we are told that working hard is the whole measure of a good life. And now artificial intelligence stands ready to take even the jobs that survived this long fight for dignity, while the profits from every new tool keep landing in the same hands they always have. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes admitted he hated his own toil, knowing he would have to leave what he built to someone who never lifted a hand for it, and that person would end up master over everything his labor had produced (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19). That gap between the ones who do the work and the ones who keep the profit has a name, and it does not close on its own. It has always had to be fought for.

America has also taught us to live life fast, and most of us never stop to ask who actually benefits from that speed. The majority of our waking hours already belong to someone else before we ever get to spend them on the people we love. By the time Friday comes, whatever is left over gets handed to family, the same family politicians love to praise in speeches, and that family gets our tired hours, not our best ones, because work already took the best ones first. A life poured out for a corporation that will replace us within a week of losing us is not something Scripture asks us to call noble. It is closer to a tragedy dressed up as ambition. A life spent present with the people we love was never something we had to earn on the side. It was always meant to be the blessing itself.

That same taken-for-granted logic follows the worker straight into the uniform, and Scripture already told this story once, in painful detail. King David wanted another man's wife, and that man, Uriah, happened to be one of his own soldiers, faithfully serving on the front lines while David stayed home in comfort. So David sent orders to the battle commander to put Uriah in the fiercest part of the fighting and then pull back the support around him, so that Uriah would die and the problem would be solved (2 Samuel 11:14-17). Uriah never knew he was carrying his own death sentence, sealed by the very king he served, for no reason beyond that king's own desire. That story has survived three thousand years in Scripture because it names something power keeps doing to the people who serve it. A leader safe at home decides a soldier's life is worth less than that leader's comfort, and the soldier never gets a vote in the matter.

We are watching a version of that same story play out again. Young soldiers, many of them barely out of high school, raise their right hand and mean it, while the most powerful men in the country decorate their own lives in gold, comfort, and monuments to their own name. A young soldier can be minutes away from becoming a different kind of monument entirely, a folded flag and a name carved into stone in a hometown that will grieve them forever. David at least eventually faced a prophet who looked him in the eye and said, in essence, you are the man who did this (2 Samuel 12:7). Power today rarely faces that same reckoning in the moment, which is exactly why it needs to be named out loud, plainly and without flinching, by anyone still willing to say it.

None of this lets the rest of us off the hook simply because we are not the ones in the Oval Office or the corner office. Being taken for granted starts smaller than that, in places most of us would rather not look too closely. It is the coworker who covers a shift again because asking someone else felt like too much trouble, and nobody ever offers to cover theirs back. It is the spouse whose cooking, cleaning, or overtime gets praised out loud once a year and expected every other day without a word of thanks. Somewhere in most of our lives is a person quietly carrying weight we should be sharing, and we have gotten comfortable letting them. The same heart that lets a president build monuments to himself while soldiers die in his shadow is not a foreign heart. It is a human one, sized down to a kitchen table instead of an oval office, and it needs the same honest look inward we are quick to aim at the people running the country.

Grace does not leave any of us there, and it never has. The God who rested on the seventh day has never once treated a single human life as expendable, disposable, or beneath his notice. Every worker exhausted by a system built to extract more than it gives back is still someone God formed on purpose, with the same care he used to hang the stars. Every soldier standing watch tonight in a place most of us will never see is still someone whose name is known by God long before it might ever be carved into stone. That truth does not erase the cost of being taken for granted. It does insist that the ones doing the taking will not have the final word on anyone's worth.

Taken for granted is not a new condition, and it will not end on its own. It has always required people willing to say, out loud and without apology, that the ones who build this country and the ones who bleed for it deserve to be seen as more than what they provide. Somewhere tonight, a family will sit down to supper with one chair still empty, because a shift ran long again, or because a deployment is not over yet. That empty chair does not feel small to the people sitting around it, whatever a schedule or a war might say about it. Whether we keep setting that chair without noticing, or finally set it understanding what it costs someone else to fill, will say more about who we are becoming than any speech given this Labor Day ever will.

09/04/2026

Soul Searching America
By A Country Pastor

Eight weeks. That is what is left before votes decide, not what comes next, but what we continue to become. Search its soul, the pundits keep saying. Turn on any channel and some commentator is telling Republicans to search their soul, or telling Democrats to search theirs, louder now that the clock is running down. Nobody asks the harder question underneath all of it. What if the soul they keep talking about is not scattered off somewhere separate from us, but sitting together in a body larger than either party, made of every one of us who calls it home, and waiting on all of us at the same time?

Scripture never hesitates to hold a whole nation accountable, and it never treats that nation as some abstraction floating above the people inside it. Amos opened his book naming one nation after another, Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Judah, Israel, weighing each one's collective conduct as a single body before God (Amos 1-2). The prophets spoke to Assyria and Babylon and Egypt the same way, judging what a people had built together, not just the private failings of a handful of individuals hiding inside it. A nation's character is not a metaphor to Scripture. It is real enough to be named, real enough to be weighed, real enough to be held responsible for the fruit it grows.

Nineveh shows us what it looks like when a collective soul actually turns. When God sent Jonah to warn the city, the whole city moved together. The king rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he decreed that everyone under him, from the greatest to the least, would fast and wear sackcloth too, even the animals, and that everyone would turn from their evil ways and the violence in their hands (Jonah 3:5-9). That is not a private, scattered awakening happening quietly in a hundred separate hearts with no connection to each other. That is a nation kneeling in the same dust at the same hour, a collective soul choosing together to be searched, starting with the one who wore the crown. But look closer at what actually moved the city. It was not the decree. It was the king’s own soul turning first, in ashes, before he ever asked anyone else to kneel. We have no king today, and if we are honest, no decree from any leader has ever changed a soul, ours included. What we do have is the same thing the king had before he ever gave an order: our own soul, ours to turn, starting today, with no one’s permission and no one’s command required

What passes for soul searching today rarely looks like Nineveh. When a pundit tells the other party to search its soul, it is not usually a summons for anyone to turn. It is a weapon traded back and forth to make the other side look guilty while our own side gets a pass. That kind of soul searching costs nothing and changes nothing, because it was never meant to reach a single actual heart. It was meant to win the segment, win the argument, win the next eight weeks. Nineveh's king did not decree sackcloth for the city next door. He put it on himself first, then called everyone under him to do the same, and that order matters more than we usually admit.

David understood that order too. He did not pray for Israel's collective soul to be searched while he stood outside the reckoning, pointing at everyone else. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23-24). A collective soul is still made of individual souls, and it never turns until enough of those individual souls are willing to go first, the way the king of Nineveh went first, the way David went first, before asking anything of the people around them.

Jesus told us how to read what a tree has grown. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit (Matthew 7:16-17). A party's fruit is not separate from the souls who planted it, watered it, and kept defending it long after it turned bitter. It grew from what we allowed, what we excused, what we cheered because our side did it. Eight weeks from now, whichever party wins will not have grown a new soul in that time. It will simply have shown the fruit it already had to more people than usual.

One party has grown its fruit on fear of the stranger, on protecting wealth already gathered at the top, and on wrapping all of it in the language of faith while its policies leave the poor further behind and the immigrant treated as a threat instead of a neighbor. Jesus gave His harshest woes to religious leaders who wore that same kind of piety, certain they alone were following God, certain their righteousness set them apart from everyone else, all while missing Jesus standing right in front of them (Matthew 23:23-28). Wrapping fear and self-interest in the language of faith is not new. Jesus said whatever we do for the least of these, we do for Him (Matthew 25:40). A party that claims His name while leaving the poor and the stranger behind has not honored Him. It has missed Him the same way the Pharisees did. That fruit is not a mystery handed down from some faceless machine. It is the fruit of a collective soul, grown because enough of us in that body kept feeding the root.

The other party has grown its own fruit, and it deserves the same unflinching look. It says it does not want control, and it genuinely recoils from the idea of forcing anyone into line by law or by force. But watch what it actually reaches for. It takes people who still carry real hatred in their hearts and asks them to speak nice, as if changing the words could stand in for changing the heart. Changing a heart has always been God's work, not ours, and no amount of pressure has ever managed to do it for Him. So instead of that harder, truer fruit, the other party settles for something smaller, hatred still alive underneath, only dressed now in nicer language. Jesus warned about exactly that kind of covering over. Woe to you, He said, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness (Matthew 23:27). That smaller fruit is still their fruit, and sugarcoating it does not make it good. It only makes it harder to see.

Micah gave the measure long before either party existed to weigh in on it. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). Justice without kindness is not the Kingdom of God. Kindness without humility is not the Kingdom of God. Whichever party wins in eight weeks will still be standing on the kingdom of man, wearing whatever color happens to be winning that particular year, and its collective soul will still bear whatever fruit the souls inside it have been growing all along.

So much of what divides us comes from mistaking control for change. One side has learned to talk about law and order while showing less and less patience for the law itself, reaching instead for whatever power keeps its people in charge, no matter what courts or elections or written rules stand in the way. The other side, uncomfortable with that kind of force, reaches for a quieter version of the same instinct, deciding that anyone who disagrees, even in good conscience, must be labeled hurtful before their view is even heard. Both are still trying to force the nation to turn from the outside in, the way no true turning in Scripture has ever worked. Nineveh did not change because Jonah seized the city gates and made everyone bow. It changed because a king took off his own robe first, and then everyone under him chose sackcloth for themselves, one household at a time. Real turning has never once come from one side gaining enough power, or enough control of the words allowed, to make everyone else behave.

Here is where hiding behind the party's name stops working, and where the hope begins. A party can kneel, because a party is nothing more or less than the people who make it up, and every one of us reading this is one of those people. Nineveh proves a whole city can turn together when enough hearts choose to go first. Every soul who has voted out of habit rather than conviction, every soul who has excused cruelty because their own side did it, every soul who has stayed quiet while the fruit turned bitter because speaking up felt like betrayal, that soul is part of the body that still needs searching, and that body can still turn the way Nineveh turned, starting today, without waiting eight more weeks for permission.

Nobody knows what election day will bring. What we do know is that a nation's soul is never really separate from us, waiting somewhere out past our own front door for someone else to search it. It is us, gathered together, growing whatever fruit we have been willing to grow. Search us, O God, and know our hearts. Test us and know our thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in us, in the party we have defended, in the silence we have called loyalty, and lead us in the way everlasting.

09/03/2026

Heaven's Blueprint: The Kingdom We Want After Death, But Oddly Not Now
By A Country Pastor

Enough food for everyone. No hunger. No war. No greed. Ask a hundred people what heaven looks like and most will describe it the same way, an untouched paradise, plenty for all, no rich and no poor, no borders keeping neighbor from neighbor, unity instead of division. Say that same description out loud on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a policy debate, though, and someone will call it a leftist fantasy, dangerous, naive, even godless. The joke has been shared a thousand times online because it lands somewhere true. We long for the Kingdom of God with our whole hearts on Sunday and call it un-American on Monday.

This same week, the vice president of the United States told a podcast host he senses spiritual darkness in world leaders, something that sets off every spiritual alarm bell he owns. He defended the president's meme depicting himself as Jesus. And in a separate interview he said if his own work in this administration helps bring about the end times, that is okay with him, because he is focused on doing God's work. Three headlines, one pattern. Power speaks the language of prophecy and darkness and divine mission with great comfort, while love, provision, and shared abundance get mocked as ideology. That ordering deserves our attention.

Long before anyone used the word leftist, the earliest followers of Jesus were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need (Acts 2:44-45). They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, breaking bread together, holding everything in common. Jesus opened his own ministry not with a call to empire but by reading from Isaiah in the synagogue, declaring that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free (Luke 4:18). Micah put it plainer still: what does the Lord require but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). None of that reads like a modern political platform pasted onto Scripture. It reads like Scripture itself, describing exactly the world so many of us picture when we close our eyes and imagine heaven.

Here is where the discomfort lives. We are far more willing to let heaven be a place of radical generosity than we are willing to let earth be one. We will sing about every tribe and nation gathered in peace, then argue for hours about whether our neighbor deserves help. We call a classless, moneyless, stateless unity beautiful when God promises it after death, and dangerous when anyone suggests moving even a few inches toward it while we are alive. Meanwhile, those holding the most earthly power often reach for the opposite comfort. They speak of darkness they alone can sense in others, of destinies too holy to question, of end times that excuse rather than examine present choices. A man can say his work might help usher in the end of the world and call that okay, all while the plainer, harder command to feed the hungry and clothe the poor sits unanswered right in front of him.

Before we point too far outward, it is worth asking what we ourselves resist. Do we secretly prefer a heaven that keeps its generosity safely in the future, so it never asks anything of our wallet, our schedule, our comfort now? Do we reach for prophecy and darkness talk of our own when it is convenient, blaming forces beyond us instead of naming the choices in front of us? The human heart has always preferred a religion that excuses the present while promising the future. Amos warned Israel about exactly this, a people eager for worship and feast days while trampling the poor and pushing aside the needy at the gate (Amos 5:11-12). We are not so different. Every generation finds new language for the same old dodge.

None of this leaves us without hope, because the Kingdom of God was never meant to wait quietly for someday. Jesus taught us to pray for it to come, on earth as it is in heaven, not simply for it to arrive somewhere else after we are gone (Matthew 6:10). Every time a family gets fed, every time a debt gets forgiven, every time a community chooses shared abundance over hoarded wealth, heaven's blueprint gets traced a little further into the dirt of this world. God's way has never been leftist or rightist. God's way has simply been love, offered freely, asked to be shared freely in return. The Kingdom does not need our political parties to bless it. It only needs our hearts to stop being embarrassed by it.

Maybe the real question is not whether heaven sounds too radical for earth, but whether our hearts have grown too comfortable with a world that looks nothing like it.

09/02/2026

He Does Not Care About You: When a Wedding Becomes a Funeral, He Doesn’t Care
By A Country Pastor

Is the one you love capable of loving you back? Can you see it in their eyes before they ever say a word? In a few weeks I will stand at the front of a sanctuary for a wedding, watching a young couple who already know the answer.

I have known this young lady's family for years. Her father and mother built a home where love was not a word they used, it was a way they lived, poured out on each other and on everyone who walked through their door. Their daughter grew up inside that love until it became part of who she is, inside and out. Watching her now, ready to build her own home on that foundation, is one of the purest joys a pastor gets to witness.

Jesus's first miracle happened at a wedding, in a small town called Cana, where He turned water into wine so the celebration would not run dry (John 2:1-11). Wherever love gathers people to celebrate a new beginning, Jesus has always shown up, and that is why it hardly matters which wedding we picture next. It could have been the one in a few weeks. This week it was a wedding in a home in Kuhestak, in southern Iran, where families had gathered the same way our families gather, to bless two young lives starting one together. A missile struck that home. Five people are dead, including a child, and dozens more are wounded. The strike came from our own country, ordered by a president who called it "very justified." This could have happened at any wedding, in any country, on any day, because this is a sickness that has nothing to do with geography. It is the sickness of a heart with no room left in it for anyone else, a heart willing to erase a room full of joy without ever once looking into a single face first.

Among the five who died was a child, someone who will never grow up, never stand at the front of a sanctuary on their own wedding day, never hold a child of their own. A missile does not just take a life, it takes every year that life was still owed. In a few days our own country will mark the anniversary of September 11th, when we buried children who had done nothing but go to work or school on an ordinary morning, and we grieve those stolen futures every single year. But grief for a stolen future does not stop being real just because the child is buried on the other side of the world instead of ours. A future taken in Kuhestak is exactly as gone as a future taken in New York, and God does not keep two scales for weighing the loss.

That contrast is not an accident. It is a window into two entirely different hearts, and Scripture has been describing the difference between them since the beginning.

The prophet Ezekiel confronted the leaders of his own people with words that still cut today: "Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, but you do not feed the sheep" (Ezekiel 34:2-3). The sheep were scattered, the weak were not strengthened, the lost were not sought, and still the shepherds lived well off what belonged to the flock. God's anger here is not abstract. It is the anger of a Father watching His children be used by the very people entrusted to care for them.

This pattern shows up again and again across Scripture because the human heart has not changed. Pharaoh built his kingdom on the backs of an enslaved people. Saul hunted the shepherd boy God had chosen to lead in his place. Herod slaughtered the children of an entire town rather than risk his own crown. Different centuries, same disease: a heart so full of itself there is no room left to hold anyone else.

Jesus described the opposite of that heart in the plainest terms He ever used: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). Real love costs the one who gives it. It shows up in what a person is willing to give away, not in what they manage to keep for themselves.

We are watching this same old disease play out again in front of us. Candidates are being handpicked not because of what they will do for the communities asking them for votes, but because of how loyal they have proven themselves to one man. Their job, once elected, is not to represent the people who sent them. It is to protect him. The people casting their ballots believe they are choosing someone to fight for their schools, their jobs, their children's future. What they are actually choosing, again and again, is another voice that will defend one man's power no matter what it costs everyone else.

Meanwhile the people who most need someone in their corner keep waiting. Families cannot afford groceries while he decorates his surroundings in gold and commissions monuments to his own legacy. Young soldiers are sent into harm's way, minutes from becoming a name etched into a hometown memorial, while he lives in luxury, lives in safety, lives what he calls his best life ever. And still the candidates handpicked in his image tell the very people being left behind that this is what fighting for them looks like.

A heart that truly cared about the people would not need to be reminded to care about them. Micah asked what God requires and answered it plainly: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). Justice for the people. Kindness toward the people. Humility, not domination.

A vow is supposed to mean something, spoken in front of God and witnesses. The oath he took on the steps of the Capitol is one of the most serious a person can make, binding a president to serve an entire country, not just himself. His wife stood beside him holding two Bibles, one of them the very Bible Abraham Lincoln placed his hand on while a nation was tearing itself apart. When the moment came, his hand never landed on either one. Nothing about that broke the law, the Constitution asks only for the words. But watch what has followed since that hand went up. Power has been handed out and taken away based on loyalty to him, not service to the people. Candidates are protected or abandoned by that same measure. Agencies meant to serve the whole country are reshaped to answer to one man instead. A vow to serve the people was quietly traded for a system that serves the one who took it, and that trade is the real cost of a promise that was never fully meant to bind him.

Scripture has never treated vows lightly, because a vow reveals the heart behind it. "When you make a vow to God, do not delay fulfilling it, for he has no pleasure in fools; fulfill what you vow" (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5). A leader who cannot hold onto a vow made to an entire nation should not surprise us when the people under his power start mattering less than his hold on it.

Before we point too quickly at any one leader, we have to ask ourselves a harder question. Whose loyalty have we rewarded and whose need have we quietly overlooked because it cost us something to notice? It is easy to grieve a tragedy overseas and never check whether we ourselves have grown too comfortable while a neighbor goes without. The same self-focused heart that builds monuments to itself in the halls of power can just as easily build smaller, quieter monuments in our own homes and our own circles of friends.

Every one of us is shaped daily by what we choose to feed. We can feed the part that hoards and keeps score, or the part that gives and shows up for people who have nothing to offer us back. That choice, repeated enough times, becomes a life. It becomes a family. Eventually it becomes a nation.

This is not where the story has to end, because it is not where God's story ever ends. The hope in this story was never going to be found in the missile. The hope was in the wedding itself, in the water turned to wine at Cana, in every ordinary home where two people promise to love each other for life, including the one in Kuhestak before the missile came. The same Scripture that names the shepherds who fed only themselves also promises something better: "I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured" (Ezekiel 34:15-16). God has never stopped being the kind of shepherd who actually cares for the flock.

The young couple I will stand with in a few weeks did not learn to love each other in a vacuum. They learned it from parents who practiced it daily, imperfectly, faithfully, until it became second nature. That is still available to any of us, to a nation weary of leaders who feed themselves while the flock goes hungry. Love that costs something is still the most powerful force in this world, stronger than any missile, more lasting than any monument built to one man's name.

He may not care about you. But the God who made you never stopped, and neither have the people quietly loving their neighbors in His name, one ordinary act of kindness at a time.

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