The Texts They Used Against You: The truth about harm and repair

Scripture used against women has been one of the most damaging tools in evangelical culture, and today we're naming it directly.

What if the church didn't just get it wrong? What if it used scripture to make sure you blamed yourself? In this episode of Jesus, Justice + Mercy, Kristen takes a hard look at three passages that have been weaponized against women, Ezekiel 34, Matthew 18, and 2 Corinthians 5, and shows what they actually say about harm, accountability, and repair.

This episode is for the woman who has been told her hurt was less important than institutional peace. For the woman who was sent back to a room that was hurting her, with a Bible verse attached. For the woman still carrying something that was never hers to carry.

What Ezekiel 34 Says 

God's indictment of shepherds who scattered the flock instead of protecting it, and what that means for churches and institutions today. Real accountability looks like leadership willing to step down, outside accountability that isn't self-selected, and policies that protect people instead of reputations.

Matthew 18 

The text most used to demand silence was actually written to give power to the wounded. Jesus hands the entire process to the person who was wronged, and he never asks them to rush.

2 Corinthians 5 

The ministry of reconciliation was never meant to put the burden on the wounded. God moved first. The powerful one initiates. That is the theological logic of repair.

Repair vs Return

Repair and return are not the same decision. You get to make both on your own terms. A marriage, a church, a friendship, repair can happen, and return is still your choice. Always your choice.

In this episode:

• The verses used to silence women reporting abuse, assault, and affairs, and what they actually mean
• What Ezekiel 34 says about institutional failure and what real accountability requires
• How Matthew 18 was flipped from a text about the harmed person's power into a tool for institutional protection
• Why 2 Corinthians 5 puts the burden of repair on the powerful, not the wounded
• What real repair requires: truth-telling, accountability, and changed conditions
• The difference between repair and return, and why you get to choose both
• What healing looks like when the other party won't come to the table

Scripture referenced: Ezekiel 34 | Matthew 18:15–17 | 2 Corinthians 5:18–19 | Micah 6:8

Resources: RAINN: rainn.org National Domestic Violence Hotline: thehotline.org Church abuse accountability: GRACE, netgrace.org

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

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Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

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Transcript

The texts they used against you: The truth about harm and repair

What if the church didn't just get it wrong? What if it used scripture to make sure you blamed yourself? Stay with me for today's episode, because the texts that were used to silence you might say something entirely different.

Intro

Hey friend, welcome back to Jesus, Justice + Mercy.

Today is a bit longer of an episode but after reworking a dozen times more than normal it felt like it needed the full weight. But before we go where we're going today, I want to share what I'll be talking about today so you can decide if now is the right time for you to safely listen.

This episode covers the ways the church has used scripture to silence women harmed by sexual abuse and assault, affairs, infidelities, indiscretions etc. If any of that is close to the surface for you right now, if you're in a rough place, it is completely okay to sit this one out until you have more ground under your feet. There is no gold medal for pushing through before you're ready. And if you need support, please reach out to someone you trust. I'll also add some resources in the show notes.

If you're staying, I'm glad you're here. And I want to start by saying something that the church has spent a very long time making sure women never got to hear.

You are not to blame.

Not for his affair. Not for the wandering eyes. Not for the way he brushed up next to you. Not for what happened to you in that room, in that car, in that relationship, in that church office. Not for the dismissal. Not for the marriage that broke. Not for the family that fractured. Not for any of it.

You are not to blame.

And yet, so many of us were told, directly or indirectly, explicitly or through a thousand quiet corrections, that we were. We weren't enough. We were too much. If we had just been more available, more forgiving, more covered up, more spiritually mature, more patient, more silent, none of it would have happened.

And I want you to know. That is a lie. And it has been dressed up in scripture and delivered from pulpits and whispered by well-meaning women who absorbed the same lie and were just passing it down because nobody had ever told them the truth either. Generational trauma tends to work that way.

Let me share some statements used to keep us quiet:

"A wife's body belongs to her husband," used to silence women reporting marital rape.

"You need to forgive and restore the marriage," used to send women back to abusers.

"We don't want to damage his ministry," used to protect pastors who assaulted the women in their congregations.

"This is a private matter for the family," used to bury what should have been a criminal report.

"She was dressed provocatively." "She was alone with him." "She talked to him first." "She was out too late," used to transfer the blame for a man's assault onto the body of his victim.

This is not ancient history. It's not a few bad actors. This is a system. And it is still running. Just scroll social media for any amount of time. It is happening right now.

Case in point. Another Duggar. Another coverup. Josh Duggar's abuse of his sisters was defended, minimized, and spiritually reframed by a movement that had built its entire identity around family purity, when the truth came out, the institution circled its wagons around itself, not around the girls who were harmed. And here we are again with his brother Joseph.

Epstein. A decades-long trafficking network. Powerful men. Institutional silence. And still, the full accounting has not come. The names are known. Excuses are made. The cover continues. And some of the loudest defenders of that silence right now are people who call themselves Christians, who have decided that political power is worth more than the girls whose names we still don't have. This is not a secular problem that the church is watching from a distance. The church is in it. Some of it is leading the charge to keep it buried.

César Chávez, a man rightly honored for labor justice, and emerging evidence of sexual abuse and institutional silencing within the very movement built on the dignity of the vulnerable. 

Justice movements are not immune. Churches are not immune. Nonprofits are not immune. Families are not immune.

The machine that protects powerful men at the expense of women and children is, unfortunately, not a bug in evangelical culture. In too many places, it has been a feature. It is woven into the theology of submission, the culture of institutional protection, and the silence required of women who are convinced it is the only way to remain faithful.

But here is what that does to us over time: it trains us to doubt our own experience. It trains us to absorb blame that was never ours, to make ourselves smaller so that the men and the institutions around us can stay comfortable and intact.

That is formation. And we have work to do.

You Are Not Alone. And There Is More to See.

So first, let's take a breath because this is all so hard, but you are not alone in this.

If you're sitting with something right now, a memory, a name, a room you walked out of or wish you had, know that whatever just surfaced is welcome here. You don't have to manage it and you don't have to be okay yet.

You have been carrying things that were never yours to carry. And part of what this episode is about is learning to gently set them down, not by pretending they didn't happen, but by finally seeing them clearly enough to name them for what they were.

This is the beginning of repair.

I also want to stay here for a minute, because there's something I need to share with a specific group of us listening. I'm going to say it with love, and I'm going to ask you to sit with me.

If you are a white woman, and I am talking about myself here, too, we have our own particular formation to reckon with. Many of us come to these conversations about harm and repair carrying genuine wounds, real pain, and legitimate hurt. And then we have walked into rooms where women of color have been naming harm for decades, and once again, we made it about us. Our grief. Our process.

I hate to admit that I've done this. I have taken up air that wasn't mine to take. I have centered my discomfort about learning of injustice in rooms with women who had been living it. And I've had to sit with the uncomfortable truth that being a woman who has been dismissed does not automatically make me good at not dismissing others.

The same evangelical formation that trained us to absorb blame and stay silent? It also trained many white women to center ourselves without ever recognizing it. To rush toward reconciliation with women of color because our own guilt was so uncomfortable, without pausing to ask whether they were ready, whether we had done the work, whether we were seeking genuine repair or just relief from our own feelings.

That is also harm. Quieter. More defended. Often dressed in good intentions. But it needs to be said out loud.

So here is what I want to plant right now, even if we water it later:

Am I making room for her, or am I just making room for more of me?

Not as a way to erase our own wounds, they are real, and they matter. But as a way to make sure that in ourpursuit of repair, we are not asking someone else to wait. Again.

I realize I'm holding a lot in this episode. Holding the harm done to us, the harm we may have participated in, and the question of what honest repair even looks like when the systems that caused the damage are still largely intact.

That is not a small thing.

But we're going to hold it together. And we are going to let scripture say what it actually says, not what we were trained to hear it say.

What the Scriptures Actually Say About Repair

I want to revisit some passages that have probably been quoted to you. Because I want to suggest we've been taught to read them wrong.

One of the most insidious things evangelical formation did was teach us to read scripture through the lens of institutional protection, and then tell us that was just good exegesis (or interpretation). So when we read a passage like Matthew 18, we heard “keep it in house." When we read 2 Corinthians 5, we heard "reconcile fast and ask questions later." When we read Ezekiel 34, well, we didn't read it at all, because it made the leaders uncomfortable.

Let's try to read them again. Slowly. Without that lens that we were given.

Ezekiel 34, God's Indictment of the Shepherds

This is one I want to sit with for a moment, because it is the one that most directly names what I described at the start.

Ezekiel was a priest who was God's mouthpiece during the exile in Babylon. And that context matters. He is not writing to people who might experience loss someday. He is writing to people who have already lost everything. The temple is gone. Jerusalem is gone. They are living in a foreign land wondering if God has abandoned them, or worse, if they deserved what happened. Sound familiar?

And into that specific devastation, God speaks. Not with comfort first. With accountability.

Through Ezekiel's prophecy God speaks to the shepherds of Israel, these leaders, the pastors, the ones with power over the flock, and what God says here is not gentle:

"You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them."

And then: "So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts."

God is not asking whether the shepherds meant well. He is not interested in their intentions. God is naming what they did, exploiting their positions, and more importantly, what they failed to do, and then holding them accountable for the scattering that resulted.

But before we move to what accountability looks like, I want to stay with the sheep for a moment. Because the text doesn't just describe what the shepherds failed to do, it describes what the sheep became as a result. Scattered. Strayed. Injured. Lost. Preyed upon. These are not metaphors for mild disappointment. This is what happens to people when the institutions meant to protect them choose themselves instead. They wander without direction. They carry wounds that were never bandaged. They lose trust in every room that looks like the one that hurt them. If you have ever walked out of a church, a marriage, a community, a family system feeling like you didn't know who you were anymore, Ezekiel is describing you. And God is not asking you to minimize that. God is naming it as a failure of the shepherds, not a failure of the sheep.

And that distinction matters, between failing to speak and failing to act. The shepherds in Ezekiel 34 didn't just say the wrong things. They built systems that protected themselves at the expense of the flock. That is what made the scattering inevitable.

Real accountability in a church looks the same way. It looks like leadership that is willing to step down, outside accountability that isn't self-selected, policies that protect people instead of reputations, and a reporting structure that doesn't route through the people who caused the harm. If the only thing that changed was the apology, nothing changed. Words without structure are just better managed silence.

Once again, justice for the oppressed is a theme of the prophets. And once again, the prophetic word doesn't end with condemnation. It ends with a promise.

This chapter ends pointing to a Messiah who establishes a covenant of peace in verse 25 and full restoration for his people. And I want you to hear what that covenant actually contains, because it is not vague hope. God promises that the wild beasts will be removed. That the sheep will dwell securely. That the land will no longer be a place of fear. The covenant of peace is not just about forgiveness, it is about dismantling the conditions that caused the harm in the first place. God is not just reconciling the sheep to the shepherd. God is promising that what scattered them will be gone. That is the destination this whole episode is moving toward.

That covenant of peace is the destination. But you don't get there without someone willing to tell the truth first. And in every generation, God seems to find someone willing to walk that road even when the institution tries to block it, someone willing to say what the shepherds won't.

Ida B. Wells, a journalist and sociologist at the turn of the 19th century, understood this text in her bones, even if she never cited the passage. When she began documenting and publishing the truth about lynching in the American South in the 1890s, the institutional church, Black and white, largely told her to be quiet. Her newspaper office was burned to the ground. She was run out of Memphis. And the shepherds, the pastors, the leaders, the men with platforms, mostly stayed silent because speaking out would cost them something.

She kept writing anyway.

Because she understood what Ezekiel 34 names: when the shepherds fail, the scattered sheep don't need more silence. They need someone willing to tell the truth about what happened and why. That is not divisiveness. That is faithfulness.

The same institutions that protected Josh Duggar, and are now watching his brother Joseph face his own child molestation charges, the movement leaders who silenced women inside the UFW for decades rather than name what César Chávez did to them, the powerful networks still managing the exposure of the Epstein case rather than demanding full accountability: Ezekiel 34 is written about them. Not as condemnation from us but as an indictment from God.

Matthew 18:15–17, The Text Most Used Against Her

If you grew up in evangelical spaces, you have probably been quoted Matthew 18. "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." There is validity to that passage. There are times when going directly to the person first is the right move, when the harm is relational, when the relationship is worth repairing, when you are safe enough to have that conversation. Private accountability can be real accountability.

In college at a conservative Christian school, we even had a name for it. We called it "carefrontation", going to someone about their sin, wrapped in enough warmth that it didn't feel like confrontation. And in that environment, sin had a very specific definition. Mostly it looked like who you were dating, whether you were drinking, or whether your quiet time was consistent. And honestly, sometimes the conversation was needed. But it also carried a weight of judgment that had very little to do with harm and everything to do with compliance.

What we were often taught Matt. 18 meant was a different kind of private entirely. Not the private of an honest conversation between two people. The private of a closed door and a lowered voice and a warning about what happens if this goes any further. Keep it quiet. Don't involve anyone else. Don't go to the authorities. Don't make it public. Handle it privately, which in practice almost always meant: protect the institution, protect the leader, protect the perpetrator.

But that is not exactly what this text says.

Look at who Jesus puts in charge of this process. Not the elders. Not the institution. Not the one with the title or the platform or the power. It's the person who was wronged.

It is the harmed person who decides when and how to begin. It is the harmed person who determines whether the response was enough. It is the harmed person who brings others in if it wasn't. And it is the harmed person who has the final word on whether anything actually changed.

Jesus built a process and then handed it to the one with the least power in the room. That is not a small thing. That is the upside-down kingdom doing exactly what it promised.

And if the person who caused harm still refuses to hear? Jesus says, let them be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Which is Jesus saying: you are released. You do not owe this person your continued presence. You are not required to stay in a relationship with someone who will not be accountable.

The church took that text, the one where Jesus hands power to the wounded, and flipped it. Used it to demand silence. Used it to protect the institution. Used it to keep women in rooms that were hurting them.

That is not exegesis. That is a betrayal with a Bible verse attached.

And there is one more thing Jesus builds into this process that the church quietly removed. He never asks you to rush. Every step has to be completed before the next one begins. You don't skip ahead to reconciliation. You don't release anyone before you're ready. The process moves at the pace of the harmed person, not the institution, not the elder board, not the person waiting to be forgiven. Jesus built a "not yet" into the text itself. The church took it out.

2 Corinthians 5:18–19, Who Moves First

So, Matthew showed us that the harmed person holds the process. But 2 Corinthians has been used against us just as hard. "God gave us the ministry of reconciliation" becomes: you need to go reconcile. You need to initiate. You need to be the bigger person. The burden gets handed right back to the wounded.

But listen to what Paul actually says. In this passage, God is the one with all the power. And God is the one who moved first, not waiting for us to come crawling back, but initiating, absorbing the cost, closing the gap. That is the model. The one with power moves first. The one who caused the rupture initiates the repair. The burden does not belong to the wounded.

In the Message translation, it reads: "All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between him and us, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins."

Did you catch that? God settled it first. The one with power initiated. The one who had been wronged absorbed the cost of moving toward repair. God paid.

That is the theological logic of reconciliation. The one with power moves first. The one who caused harm initiates. The burden does not belong to the wounded.

And the ministry of reconciliation Paul gives to us is not a mandate to close that gap before the conditions are right. It is the proclamation that closing it is possible at all.

Two passages. Both hijacked to put the burden on the wounded. Matthew gives the harmed person the power to hold the process. Paul gives the powerful person the responsibility to initiate repair. The church flipped both of them.

And if you are the one who caused harm, because sometimes we are, this is what that initiation actually looks like in practice. Not a technique. A reflection of how God moved. Acknowledge what happened. Take responsibility for your part. Commit to specific change. That's it. No minimizing, no explaining, no defending. You will know you've received real accountability from someone else for the same reason, it won't come with a but.

What This Looks Like 

Real repair, the kind that actually makes it safe to come back to the table, moves through three things. Not quickly or cleanly. But in this order. And I want to be clear, these only work when both parties are willing. When the person or institution refuses accountability, the work shifts, not toward repair with them, but toward healing without them. I'll come back to that. But let's start with what genuine repair requires.

First we need to be willing to tell the truth, even if it is scary.

Someone has to name what happened. Specifically. Without minimizing, without over-dramatizing, without the qualifications that protect the person who caused harm. "This is what you did. This is what it cost me."

This can be the hardest step for women formed in evangelical spaces, because we were taught that naming harm directly is unloving. That naming harm out loud is un-Christian. That naming harm at all is the real problem.

It is not. This is not divisive. Unaddressed harm is divisive. Telling the truth is the only foundation on which repair can be built.

In a relationship, it might look like this: a friend sits down and says, "When you repeated what I told you in confidence, it broke something between us. I need you to know what that cost me." This is not picking a fight. Not an ultimatum. Just a specific, named truth spoken directly to the person who you need to hear it.

In a church it looks like a congregation that creates an actual process, not a suggestion box, not a closed-door meeting with the elders, but a real, transparent process where people who have been harmed can speak and be heard without fear of being managed or silenced or removed. Truth-telling in a church context requires the institution to build a container for it. That is rare. It is also what faithfulness looks like.

What about when someone genuinely didn't mean to hurt you, but they did?

"I know you didn't mean to hurt me butthe impact was still harm." Both of those things are true. Both matter. Intent does not erase impact. A person can have genuinely good intentions and still cause real damage, and accountability requires holding both without letting one cancel the other. When they lead with their intentions, and they will, you can simply say: "I hear that. And this is still what it cost me."

I've lived this one. I had to go back to youth leaders at a former church and tell them that something that happened on their watch had hurt my boys. They didn't know. They never intended it. These were really good people. But I watched my youngest carry something that started in that room, and I had to be the one to name it, not to blow anything up, but because the impact was real and it deserved to be said out loud.

The leader heard me. And I want to be honest about what that felt like, and what it didn't feel like. Being heard is not the same as being taken seriously. I offered to return and provide trauma-informed training for their staff. They never took me up on it. And that silence told me something. The conversation happened. The accountability didn't. The changed conditions never came.

It's not a small distinction. That is the difference between a church that is willing to be uncomfortable for five minutes and a church that is willing to actually change even with amazing people in charge.

Reconciliation that happens before truth and accountability does not make you whole. It just makes the room quieter. And then it re-harms. It tells the person who was hurt that the institution's comfort matters more than their healing. Again.

You are allowed to say: not yet. You are allowed to mean it.

When Your Repair Becomes Someone Else's Burden

There is one last thing I need to name today. And I'm going to use my own voice here because I think that's the only honest way to say it.

I have sat across from women of color, who were trying to tell me something about their experience. Something painful. Something that had cost them. And I couldn't hear them. Not really. Because I was too full of my own hurt or defensiveness to make room for theirs. I was so focused on my own wounds that their story became background noise to the story I was already telling myself.

And sometimes, honestly, I minimized what they were going through. Not out loud. Not on purpose. But in my own head, in the way I half-listened and then redirected back to my own experience, in the way their pain made me uncomfortable, so I moved past it faster than I should have. Because if their wound was real and large, it complicated my own narrative. It required something of me I wasn't ready to give.

That is not repair or community. It’s self-protection with better optics.

Here is what I've had to learn, and I am still learning it: you cannot do this work well if your own internal voice is so loud that you can't hear anyone else. Our unexamined wounds don't make us more empathetic; they make us less available. It turns every conversation into a referendum on our own pain. It makes other people's suffering into a mirror we're only looking at to find ourselves.

This is why the internal work has to come first. Not as a prerequisite that gets you off the hook from showing up, but as the thing that makes showing up actually real rather than surface.

So here is the question I now try to sit with before I walk into hard spaces:

Have I tended to my own wounds enough today that I can actually hear someone else's?

Not perfectly healed. Not finished. But tended. Stable enough to be genuinely curious about someone else's experience rather than secretly waiting for my turn to speak.

Your repair is yours to do. Her repair is hers to do. And the most important work you can do before you show up in shared spaces is to make sure your hurt is in your own hands, not bleeding out onto the people around you who are already carrying enough.

Ironically, I've been dreaming about a different kind of gathering for women, one where white women do their own formation work first, before they ever enter shared space with women of color. Not as a rule. As an act of preparation. Because showing up without that work isn't community. It's extraction. And the difference between the two is whether you've done enough of your own interior work to be genuinely present to someone else's.

When the Other Party Won't Come to the Table

Lastly, let’s talk about what happens when the other party won't come to the table.

Again, I want to start with something personal, because I think it is important to be vulnerable and for you to know this isn't just a to-do list that I put on someone else.

I once had a 6-year relationship end without a word. No conversation, no explanation, no door left open to ask questions. Just, absence. And I spent a long time in that silence trying to make sense of something I had no access to, healing from something I couldn't fully name because I didn't have the whole story, any of the story.

Two years later, the person came back wanting to explain. And what I noticed was that by then, the explanation felt more like it was for them than for me. I had already done the painful work of healing without it, and I wasn't willing to reopen the wound. The conversation they needed to have was no longer the conversation I needed to have. I had moved through it without them.

That experience taught me something I could not have learned any other way: sometimes the closure we're waiting for is not coming. And our healing cannot be held hostage to someone else's timeline, someone else's readiness, someone else's willingness to show up.

Sometimes the person who caused harm won't acknowledge it or they will even make you think it was your fault. Sometimes the institution will circle the wagons. Sometimes the shepherd will protect himself instead of the flock. And sometimes, and I want to name this specifically because it is more common than we talk about, the person who harmed you is literally gone. And with that goes any possibility of confrontation, of accountability, of looking them in the eye and saying this is what you did to me and what it cost me. For many survivors of abuse and assault, this is the reality. The person who hurt them will never answer for it. That door is permanently closed.

And that is its own particular grief. You are not only healing from what happened, but you are also grieving the accountability that will never come, the conversation that will never happen, and the acknowledgment you deserved and will never receive. That loss is real. It belongs in this conversation.

And in those cases, unfortunately, repair as a two-party process is not available to us.

But that does not mean healing is not available.

Healing without the participation of the person who harmed you is real. It is slower. It is lonelier. It looks less like reconciliation and more like integration: learning to carry what happened without being defined by it, and to build something from the rubble, even when the other party won't. That is in no way a lesser form of repair. 

And it is also, sometimes, the most faithful thing you can do, to keep building, to keep naming, to keep bearing witness to what happened, even when something outside your control has determined the story is over. Sometimes the way you heal is by refusing to let it be buried or to bury you.

Ida B. Wells kept writing. Her office burned down, and she kept writing. The shepherds in her life stayed silent, and she named what they refused to name. That is not bitterness. That is faithfulness with nowhere left to hide.

CLOSING

I started today by saying something the church has spent a long time making sure women never heard.

You are not to blame.

I want to close by saying something else the church has not always been willing to say: Repair is possible. But only if we are willing to tell the truth about what actually happened.

Not the sanitized version. Not the version that protects the institution. Not the version that makes everyone comfortable at the expense of the people who were hurt.

The true version.

Rebuilding after harm is not about going back to the room the way it was. And I want to leave you with this, because the church has muddied it for too long: Repair and return are not the same decision.

Repair is about what happened between you and the truth. Return is about what you choose to do with your life after that. They are separate. And you get to make both of them on your own terms.

A marriage can be repaired, real accountability, real changed conditions, real truth-telling, and you can still choose not to go back to it. That is not a failure of forgiveness. That is a person making a wise decision about what is safe and life-giving for them.

A church can do genuine repair work, name what happened, change its structures, demonstrate over time that something is actually different, and you can still choose not to walk back through those doors. You are not required to return to prove that healing happened.

A friendship, a community, a family system, repair can occur, and return is still your choice. Always your choice.

So sometimes the answer is yes, repair happens, trust is rebuilt slowly, and you go back and build something better than what was there before. And sometimes the answer is no, repair happened, or it didn't, and either way, you are building something new, somewhere else, with people who are willing to tell the truth.

Both of those are faithful.

Micah 6:8 doesn't tell us to preserve the institution. It tells us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. Justice and mercy and humility together. Not justice without mercy. Not mercy without justice. Not humility that becomes silence.

All three. Together. Even when it's hard.

Especially when it's hard.

Thanks for hanging in with me today. I know it is a lot in a short podcast. Next week is holy week, and we are going to talk about the cross and intentionally hold some space for Holy Saturday and what we do with the in-between.

Also, if the kind of gathering I mentioned is something that resonates with you, if you want to be part of building something like that from the ground up, reach out. I'd love to talk.

Jesus, justice, no apologies