Sometime late last year, I stopped lamenting all the doom. And in a weird way, I learned to love it. Hear me out.
Nearly two thousand years ago, a man by the name of James (who historians believe was the half-brother of Jesus), wrote a letter. He was addressing small communities of Jewish followers of Jesus who’d scattered across the Roman Empire, some of them fleeing persecution. His opening advice to the forlorn worshippers has been cited by Christians and non-Christians alike:
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”
Consider it pure joy… to suffer?
James wrote those words, by the way, while living in poverty in Jerusalem among the Roman forces who’d executed his brother and who were still occupying the city in which they’d killed him. So he knew a thing or two about hardship.
This weekend, I was reminded of those lines at a church service, though I promise this isn’t a sermon. You don’t need to share James’ faith to take his point. Hard times are when you find out what you actually believe, which is true in the life of individuals and nations alike.
I spent the past few days thinking about that line because of something I say all the time: it’s an honor to face off against our current president and to counter his repression.
Despite Trump’s ceaseless corruption and near-complete moral degeneracy (case in point: this weekend he preached the gospel of not forgiving your enemies, suggesting he’d rather go to hell than do that), there’s something ennobling about the fight. In fact, we’re privileged to have a chance to defend our Constitution and our rights from his assault against them. I mean it. It also took me a long while to get to that view.
Like most, I lamented the rise of Trump. I watched alongside GOP leaders in Congress in 2015 and 2016 as the mercurial businessman took over our party. I experienced the turbulence inside the Executive Branch as he shredded democratic norms to advance his own self-interest and inflicted cruelty upon people at all levels, from political opponents to the powerless merely seeking a better life on our shores. And as most of you know, I faced personal, financial, and professional setbacks from deciding to speak out against him. Indeed, Donald Trump has managed to get me fired from jobs and (at points) forced me onto unemployment… has made it necessary to hire armed security against death threats… has upended the lives of my wife and daughter… has cost us our closest friendships, as people fled in fear… and has nearly taken away my love of country.
For months last year — after he sicced federal agents on me — my private mood was closer to lament than honor. I wondered why the country couldn’t have saved its nervous breakdown for some other generation.
But the tumult forced me, once again, to discover a lesson that’s forgotten when times are good. Trials teach us what matters. The president’s persecution allowed me to reassess my priorities and deepened my bonds with my family and my truest friends, and my affection for the simple things that eclipse the superficial. I felt alive again. And I dusted off a deeper patriotism that might otherwise have lain dormant for the rest of my life.
It may surprise you, but for that, I am grateful to Donald Trump.
The other thing that changed my mind was realizing how rare our position is. Most Americans inherit the republic the way you might inherit a house when someone passes away. They live in it and never check the foundation or appreciate its craftsmanship or consider the hands that went into its construction. We’re among the vanishingly few across our history who’ve been required to assess the foundation in order to preserve the whole structure. We’re in the crawlspace with a flashlight, and though it may not feel comfortable, what we’re finding might keep the house from coming down.
We’ve had to ask why speech should be free, why presidents must answer to courts, and why power is divided among the branches. We’ve had to relearn those answers well enough to defend them in the streets — in places like Minnesota, where our fellow citizens have been shot for doing the same — which means we know them well enough to teach them to others who we want marching and voting beside us. The founders had that privilege in spades. So did the abolitionists and the marchers at Selma. Now it’s ours, and we get to hand the next generation those first principles that have been tested within us instead of recited monotonously in a classroom, hand over heart.
I hope you’ll reflect on that this week for two reasons.
The first is that it’s working. A week ago, voters handed Democrats both chambers of Congress, with at least 54 Senate seats and a House majority projected north of 250. On January 3, a new Congress will be sworn in with subpoena power, the purse strings, and every intention of holding the Constitution up to the faces in this administration and the avaricious and unyielding little henchmen huddled around Donald Trump. That’s very good for the country, and it happened because millions of people refused to give up.
The second reason is that it could get darker for a little while. Trump’s answer to last week’s defeat was to promote a cruel egotist to lead his White House. Aides have reportedly spent months developing ways to circumvent a new Congress and, in recent days, have toyed with opening investigations into elected Democrats, jailing journalists, and testing the endurance of the courts to keep up with their power-maximizing schemes. This is what the death rattle of MAGA sounds like, and it’s likely to be loud and perilous.
The trial isn’t over yet, but how we carry forward matters. People who lament their circumstances for too long will burn out, and so will our society if we don’t ready ourselves for the long haul. Yet people who learn to count adversity as an honor somehow find the spirit to show up again tomorrow (and they even bring their kids to the rally).
So when the times get tough again — which they will — consider it pure joy, my friends. And if joy is too much to ask, then count it an honor. You’re earning riches beyond Donald Trump’s wildest imagination because, unlike him, you’re acquiring the deed to the whole future. And in doing so, you’re keeping it safe from the damned.
Your friend, in defiance,
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