The following is written by Derek Penwell, Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church. It's an open letter that Penwell first shared this piece on his substack,
Heretic Adjacent, and then on Facebook, where I came across it.
On one level, this piece is for all of us living in the U.S. at this profoundly troubling time; this is especially felt through Penwell’s call to each one of us to “be gentle and brave.” Yet in particular, Penwell is imparting a very direct message to those “waking up to consequences they thought had someone else’s name on them.”
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Friends,
Christmas is over now.
The music has faded, the manger scenes are being boxed up, and the country is stumbling back into ordinary time with a hangover nobody planned for. For some of you, that hangover isn’t just emotional. It’s the price of utilities. It’s the cost of medication your insurance no longer covers. It’s the neighbor who didn’t come home from work last week because ICE got there first. It’s the small business bleeding out because tariffs turned your supply chain into a hostage situation.
You’re waking up to consequences you didn’t think had your name on them.
You were told this would hurt “those” people. You know, the immigrants. The “illegals.” The queer kids who needed to be put back in their place. The women who wanted too much. The professors and librarians and “elites” who supposedly looked down on you. The cities. The coasts. The people who didn’t go to your church or vote like your family.
They told you the damage would be targeted, efficient, deserved.
You believed the suffering would be contained to people who had it coming.
And now you’re realizing it isn’t contained at all . . . unless, of course, you’ve got a couple billion you dropped in the couch cushions.
I want to say this carefully.
I’m not interested in gloating. Schadenfreude is cheap, and it rots the soul. I’m not going to mock your fear or dismiss your anger or tell you that you deserve everything you’re facing. Pain is pain. Fear is fear. Losing your footing in a system you trusted is genuinely destabilizing, regardless of who you are and whose team colors you’re wearing.
But I’m also not going to lie to you.
This. All this stuff unleashed on the world, it didn’t come out of nowhere.
But you’re in good company. The ground you’re standing on now is the same ground others have been standing on for a long time. Immigrant families have been holding their breath at every traffic stop for years. Queer teenagers have been calculating which parts of themselves to hide since middle school. Black parents have been having “the talk” about police encounters for generations. Disabled people have been fighting for scraps of a healthcare system that treats them like a budget problem. Women have been watching their bodies become legislative territory long before you noticed the court was stacked.
People told you what would happen. They tried to warn you. Some of you called them hysterical. Some of you called them divisive, said they were exaggerating, playing victim, making everything political.
Now you know, they weren’t just pushing leftover liberal talking points.
Here’s the hard truth most people never want to hear: cruelty never stays loyal. It doesn’t honor its contracts or keep its promises about who it will and won’t harm. It always widens its focus, looking for new bodies. So, eventually, it always finds its way home.
That’s not me being punitive. That’s me describing social/political/economic gravity.
The prophet Amos saw it clearly. “Let justice roll down like waters,” he thundered. But he also warned about what happens when it doesn’t. When we deny justice to the poor at the gate, when we trample the needy and push aside the afflicted, the whole vineyard withers. Not just their part of the vineyard. The whole damn vineyard. Because injustice isn’t a precision instrument. It’s poison dumped in the water table.
I get that some of you are angry right now. You feel betrayed by folks you thought cared about people like you, when it turns out they didn’t. And it makes sense. You were promised protection, told that their accumulation of strength meant someone else would absorb the pain. They sold you a story where order could be restored by sacrificing the right people.
But here’s the part of the story left out: once you decide some lives are expendable, you’ve already agreed that all lives are conditional. Including you, your kids, and your sweet aunt Mable, who never did anything wrong to anybody. Nobody’s safe.
I need to say something else, and I’m going to say it in as gentle a way as I know how:
Your pain doesn’t erase your participation.
You don’t get to pretend you were merely an observer because the outcome wound up surprising you. Advocacy for cruelty still counts, even if the blast radius expanded farther than you anticipated.
The ballot you cast, the policy you defended (or ignored), the joke you laughed at, the cruelty you explained away because it was pointed at someone you’d been taught doesn’t require your respect: all of it still happened. And me saying that isn’t an attack. It’s the beginning of honesty.
And honesty is the only place repentance can actually start.
The biblical word for repentance is metanoia. It doesn’t mean feeling really bad. It doesn’t mean groveling or self-flagellation. It means a complete reorientation, a turning around so thorough that you end up walking in the opposite direction. It means telling the truth about what you were willing to tolerate as long as it didn’t cost you too much. It means resisting the urge to rewrite your own history now that that history’s become a sore spot.
Repentance also means this: none of us gets to skip to the reconciliation scene without passing through accountability first. You don’t get to show up in the communities where your people lit a match and expect a hero’s welcome for finally noticing the fire. The people who’ve been burning this whole time don’t owe you cookies for showing up with a bucket.
But here’s the good news, if you're still here and you’re still willing to hear it.
This moment doesn’t have to harden you.
It can either calcify into resentment, a new grievance that finds new scapegoats, or it can crack open into something braver: solidarity that isn’t transactional. A refusal to build safety on somebody else’s suffering. A recognition that none of us gets to choose whose dignity counts without eventually paying for that choice.
If you want a bridge forward, it won’t be built out of denial. It will be built out of shared vulnerability and changed allegiance—not to a man or a party. And certainly not to the illusion that we can manage cruelty without becoming its collateral damage.
So what does that look like, practically?
I think it looks like showing up at a school board meeting to defend the teacher you once side-eyed for having a Pride flag in her classroom.
It looks like calling your congressman about ICE enforcement in your community, even though your family doesn’t have to worry about that . . . yet.
It looks like telling your uncle at the next holiday dinner that you were wrong, actually, and you’re not going to laugh at those jokes anymore.
It looks like giving money to the bail fund, the immigrant legal defense organization, and the clinic that’s still open.
It looks like saying out loud, in rooms where it costs you something: "I helped make this. And I’m done."
After Christmas, the story Christians tell is no longer about cherubic angels and shepherds in bathrobes, but about a child who grows up under military occupation, who tells the truth about power until power does him to death, and who even on the cross refuses to call down the legions that could save him. The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t secure safety through domination. That God absorbs the violence of empire and breaks its power by refusing to return it.
That story is still on the table.
But it asks something of us.
It asks us to stop calculating who deserves protection and start practicing it as if everyone does . . . because they do.
This story challenges us to stop confusing our anger with innocence. To let this moment teach us what it’s been trying to teach us all along: that the only future worth having is one where nobody’s disposable.
I know it’s difficult. But if you’re willing to begin there, you won’t be alone. There are communities already doing this work, already practicing the politics of the Beatitudes instead of the culture war. And they’ve been at this for a while. They’ll make room for you. But you’ll need to come ready to listen more than you speak. Ready to follow instead of lead. Ready to sit with the discomfort of being the newcomer in a struggle others have been waging for years.
That will cost you something.
That’s how you’ll know it’s real.
Be gentle and brave.
