I did not plan to lose my composure.

I was sitting in my living room, the television on, the day unfolding when suddenly my body reacted before my theology could catch up. I found myself yelling and cursing at the screen as lies were spoken plainly, confidently, without shame. I felt it in my chest, that tightening, that heat, that sense of being gaslit in real time. And then I watched Renee Good’s wife weep, and I came undone.

That moment broke me! It broke something open in me.

Her tears were not political. They were human. They were the kind of tears that tell the truth when words have been twisted beyond recognition. Power wants suffering to stay abstract. Policy. Rhetoric. Talking points. But grief refuses abstraction. Grief names what is real. Watching her weep, I felt the lie collapse, at least for a moment.

And I find myself asking with a growing ache, what is wrong with us that this continues? What has happened to our people?

The honest answer is not simple, but it is faithful. We are living with the consequences of a long spiritual erosion. Fear has been preached more faithfully than love. Loyalty has replaced conscience. Comfort has been chosen over truth. Somewhere along the way, cruelty began to masquerade as strength, and too many baptized it without question.

What I feel this day is not a failure of faith. It is faith refusing to go numb.

There is a moment in the Gospels when Jesus looks at the crowd and is grieved by the hardness of their hearts. Not angry first. Grieved. That grief lives in me now. It lives in many of us who are watching schools close, communities fracture, and violence be normalized while those in power insist this is order, this is safety, this is necessary.

It is not.

Anger, when rooted in love, is not the opposite of faith. It is often love’s last defense. Jesus overturned tables not because he lost control, but because he was fully present to what was being harmed. The tears I witnessed, the anger I felt, the ache that lingered, these are not signs of spiritual weakness. They are signs of a conscience that is still alive.

And yet, we cannot live on outrage alone.

We are called to tend our souls even as we tell the truth. To rest, to pray, to breathe, to weep when we need to weep. Rage without rest becomes despair. Grief without God becomes paralysis. Even Jesus withdrew when the world pressed too hard.

I am learning that faith in this moment looks like staying tender in a culture that rewards hardness. It looks like naming lies without becoming consumed by them. It looks like centering the weeping rather than the powerful. It looks like forming communities that remember our Baptismal Covenant, to respect the dignity of every human being, even when the world mocks that promise.

Nothing is wrong with you if you feel overwhelmed. Something is wrong when we stop feeling at all.

So I will stay awake. I will stay honest. I will stay rooted in the God who hears the cries of the suffering and who does not abandon the brokenhearted. Empire never gets the final word. Love does.

And I will keep trusting that even in this unraveling, God is still at work, shaping truth out of tears, and courage out of grief.

Rev. Allison Burns-LaGreca, MDiv

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