I’ve been thinking and writing about how political power corrupts the message of Jesus since at least 2019.

In 2025, I’m thinking about it a lot more.

Since 2016, I’ve been mourning how quickly the tradition that raised me has seemed to throw out the words of Christ in defense of a man who embodies the opposite of Jesus most of the time.

“Means justify the ends. He’s helping us become a Christian nation again. Christians will no longer be persecuted under Trump. He may be rough around the edges, but he’s looking out for us!”

These are the refrains I hear from the very people who told me to trust God above all else. Suddenly it’s felt like the message morphed to “Trust God and Trump.” And I have type a lot of words onto the internet about not trusting the government to do God’s work as a result.

But here’s a disturbing realization I have noticed in myself…

2022 was a good year for me. It also held a new kind of difficult. The "ands" of 2022 feel very strong, really.

In 2022, I got to spend a whole year living into my values in a new way. I got to step into a full year of doing this new thing and establishing the rhythm of life for my family I spent so long craving.

This new working pace destroyed my expectations of what good productivity should look like. In fact, this year I got the wild wake up call that productivity has been quite the idol in my life and so I spent a lot of time dethroning it. And the work of dethroning productivity, and de-commodifying my very self has resulted in a wildly different list of things I'm proud of this year than I would have anticipated or imagined in January 2022…