This New Year took me by surprise. I climbed in bed with a head cold the night of December 31 (long before midnight). I hadn’t yet reviewed 2025. I wasn’t quite ready for resolutions. From there, I woke up coughing in the middle of the night for a few days in a row. I returned to our house, with piles of boxes to break down and recycle, gifts to put away and return, and a tree that had shed most of its needles onto the living room floor.
The world around me seemed just as discombobulated and out-of-order as my body, and my house. Maybe you’ve entered 2026 feeling the same way?
Our government arrested Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, prompting a fair amount of international political instability. On the domestic front, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good. These particular events happened in the midst of continued discontent, political polarization, and unrest. It’s not an easy time.
It’s for exactly these reasons that I am so grateful for the conversation I had with Justin Giboney on the podcast this week. Justin is an author, ordained minister, attorney, and political strategist. He is the founder and president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization focused on raising civic literacy, promoting civic pluralism, and equipping Christians to engage politics with the love and truth of Jesus Christ. He is the author of Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us Out of the Culture War.
I love Justin’s combination of realism and hope when it comes to the public square. He is honest about the challenges we face as a nation while also offering an invitation to a faithful public witness. His words about forgiveness, what freedom and justice are for, and the moral imagination all gave me a renewed desire to engage in our civic life in 2026. Here’s a little glimpse of the wisdom he has to offer:
“The moral imagination is what keeps us from being captured or arrested by the moment. Moral imagination is the ability to see not just what has been in the past, what is in the present or what is likely to be in the future. It’s the ability to see what ought to be in the moment and what will be based on who God says that we are. So moral imagination allows me to look at somebody who’s cursing at me and throwing insults and not hate them back because I see something bigger.”
So in the midst of head colds and messy houses and troubling news cycles, here’s to hope and justice and the start of a new year. I hope you’ll join me in listening to Justin’s words and in looking for ways to participate in politics (and all of life) with hope, faith, and love.
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