The last time I spoke to my father was on the telephone.

He was departing on a cruise to celebrate his 70th birthday and we’d unexpectedly caught him a few minutes before leaving port. I could hear steel drums behind him as he excitedly talked about the trip ahead. We briefly shared stories of the Halloween costumes the kids had just picked out at the store, wished him a great time and happy birthday, and told him we loved him and would talk to him in a few days.

He went to dinner with my mom and other relatives, explored the ship for a bit—then went to bed and never woke up.

Just like that, our time together here was over. Forty-four years would have to be enough for me. It wasn’t.

I often wish I’d have known in those few, seemingly uneventful minutes that this was the last time I’d hear his voice while he was alive. I would have listened more intently, I would have savored every word—I probably wouldn’t have hung up.

I’d thought many times before about the day I’d no longer have my father in my life, but I never imagined it would be that day, that this would ending up being that final I love you. That’s usually how this works. Death rarely gives us the specifics in advance, in fact our last days and moments and conversations with the people we love often feel so shockingly mundane—until we see them in the rearview mirror. Then they’re breathtaking. Then they’re dramatic pivot points. Then, they’re our last goodbyes.

My father’s death has changed me in more ways than I can list or even understand, but one of the things it’s done is to remind me of the separations coming. I am more and more aware of the way our time with people actually works: we add memories all while losing seconds—addition and subtraction in concert. Many days I catch myself inventorying the relationships with those I love, and realizing that they too will all reach this place I reached with my father on that day five years ago: the spot where one of us is gone and the other left behind. I’m trying to make better use of the time before then.

The moment we meet the people we love, the clock starts ticking. The very second our paths cross with another human being, we are actually counting down. Every meaningful relationship we have in our lives, exists in the ever-shrinking time before we say goodbye to them. We should love and move and speak with the urgency befitting this truth.

I wonder how differently we’d treat the ordinary moments with people we love if we realized that they were anything but ordinary, if we could somehow in those very seconds, sense that we are rapidly losing daylight—not to depress or frighten us, but to wake us up.

I had forty-four years with my father and it wasn’t nearly enough. I didn’t want that to be the last conversation we had, but it was. Sixteen thousand and sixty days: that was the amount of time between our hello and goodbye.

I don’t know how much time I’ll have with my mother, with my wife, my kids, my friends, but I know it won’t be enough either. I’m trying to remember that when I take them for granted, when I waste moments, when I postpone saying things, when I feel like we’ll have forever.

Time is running out with the people who make your heart feel at home, with those who give this life meaning; with the ones you sleep next to and the ones who’ll call you on Father’s Day and the ones you argue with as you walk out the door and the ones you’re not speaking to anymore. Your last exchange may be while hurriedly escorting them to the bus stop or in an abbreviated midday text or in a screaming match followed by estrangement. It may be in quick phone call with steel drums in the distance.

Say the words you feel like you’ll have more time to say later. You may not.
Be honest and be clear.
Give kind words and speak truth and offer forgiveness.
And when you’re talking to those who presence you treasure and whose absence you’ll grieve deeply, listen intently and savor every word as if it’s the last conversation you’ll have.

It could be—and you probably won’t know.

Do all that you can to make good use of this beautiful, fragile, glorious extraordinary time with the people you love: the time before you say goodbye.

Get John’s book, ‘Hope and Other Superpowers’ HERE.

I need you to clarify something for me, MAGA friend.

I’ve seen all your incendiary social media posts about the border crossers.
I’ve come across the fictional statistics about their supposed crime and alleged violence, that you so willingly repost.
I’ve read Donald Trump’s rambling, all-caps, alarmists tweets.
I’ve seen the Tomi Lahren’s of the world, daily vomit their sky-is-falling talk of “border invasions.”
I’ve heard Franklin Graham’s furrow-browed sermons about the Godless, lawless threats apparently pouring into our nation.

And you’re buying that?

That’s really why you think all these people come here?

To sell drugs?
To take your jobs?
To sexually assault people?
To overrun us with gang activity?
To avoid hard work?

Is that really the story you tell yourself?

Do you actually think people brave arrest and dehydration and death just to come here and steal from us?

Are they stuffing themselves into stifling storage containers and into hidden compartments of truck beds for hours, because they’re looking to set up illegal activity?

Are they all traversing miles of sun-scorched land, carrying their children and all that they own, because they’re lazy?

Are they leaving the only home they’ve ever known, because they look forward to being in a place where they know that the President, half the lawmakers, and much of the population openly despises them?

This is a vacation, it’s a dodge from responsibility, it’s a conspiracy against America?

Is that really what you think?

If it is, I’m going to suggest either one of two things is true about you: either you’ve been so polluted by the fear peddling, fake news of this Presidency that you’re no longer able to think critically—or you have no compassion left within you.

Honestly, either of those is a pretty grim diagnosis.

The former, means that you’re easily manipulated by the most transparent of scare tactics used to terrify fragile white people.
The latter, means you’re just a lousy human being who doesn’t give a damn about suffering beyond our borders.

Either way, I feel sorry for you.

Yeah, I know what you’re going to say: “I’m not against people coming here, I just want them to do it the right way.”

The ‘right way,” is a phrase used by people who’ve never experienced true desperation.
The “right way,” is a telling symptom of inherited privilege that was born insulated from extreme poverty and violence.
The “right way,” is the rally cry of someone who’s never been faced with the kind of urgency that leaves you utterly hopeless.
The “right way,” is what selfish people say when they don’t want other people to have what they’ve been handed with a birth certificate.

If your house is engulfed in scorching flames and you’re trying to escape, what’s the “right way” to leave? The only way you can.

If you’re driving from quickly rising flood waters, what’s the “right way” to point the car? The way that saves your life.

If you’re in imminent danger from a violent assailant, what’s the “right way” to stay alive? Immediately running in the opposite direction.

You may want to actually meet these people, to hear their stories, to listen to their fears, to ask them why they do what they do—but something tells me you’re not interested in that.

I know the big, simple lie is more convenient than the individual, complex truth.

It’s easier for you to tell yourself the story that all those crossing the border are inhuman, vicious, immoral predators whose only impulse is to sidestep the law and to pillage America.

That narrative helps you feel better about the stereotypes you perpetuate and the cruelty you repost and the lack of empathy you live with, toward parents and children and friends and grandparents and young couples—who are dealing with threats and terrors that (fortunately for you) you’ll never have to experience.

The day you decide to get better, truer stories about people who don’t look like you or sound like you or weren’t born where you were born—is the day you become a more decent version of yourself.

It’s the day you stop getting mindlessly drunk on alternative Fox News facts, and join the sober community of those who are interested in helping solve complicated issues while caring for hurting people. 

And it’s the day you contribute to making America a place, not of figurative greatness—but of actual goodness.

May your compassion come, and may it know no borders.

Friend, this isn’t difficult.

I hear you making everything harder than it has to be.

All your striving and searching and pontificating is overcomplicating things and distracting you.

You’re not going to find what you need where you’ve been looking.

You already have it.

There is no magic elixir to ingest, no secret incantation to exhale, no perfectly worded prayer you need to recite, no carefully concealed cipher you have to decode in order to uncover the way to live well to leave a legacy worth surviving you.

You don’t need to wait for a politician to legislate it, a religious leader to carry it down from a cloud-shrouded mountaintop, a shimmering pop star to sing it loudly from an arena stage, or a grinning self-help guru to deliver it in slick multimedia conference center presentations.

The secret of this far-too brief appearance on the planet isn’t buried in a dusty religious text or a current airport book store bestseller, just waiting to be revealed to only those select few anointed pilgrims whose souls are properly receptive.

And you don’t need a church service, election result, protest march, or hashtag campaign to begin the necessary revolution.

The answer is startlingly simple and it’s as close as the heart within your chest.

If you want to know how to be the type of person the world needs right now—just be kind.

That’s it.

Just step out today into a world populated with grieving, wounded, hopeless human beings—and simply try to leave them less grieving and wounded and hopeless than you found them.

And being kind is more than just doing no harm—it’s working really hard to do some good: move toward people, help them, listen to them, see them, share with them, carry them. It’s the whole point of you being here.

Yes, be kind by opening doors and smiling at strangers and giving up the parking spot and paying for lunch for the guy behind you and being generous with compliments, and all that—but do more than that.

Let people love who they love. Support them in creating families and building lives and crafting futures together with people who make them feel at home, without feeling the need to impede them or affix your preferences to them or impose your religion upon them. Everyone deserves that kind of happiness, so stop trying to prevent them from it. It’s unkind.

Allow people to believe in the God they desire—or to believe in no God at all. Have the humility to admit that as strongly as you feel your convictions, every other human being you meet holds theirs. Trust that people who you disagree with you, arrived at their conclusions after as much contemplation and diligence as you have—and the truth is you don’t really know any more than they do anyway, so hold that stuff loosely. Respect and even celebration of difference is kind.

Treat people as if them gaining something does not have to automatically mean you losing. Life isn’t a zero-sum game, despite what you’ve been told or been led to believe. There’s actually enough of everything to go around: money, food, healthcare, opportunity, community, so resist hoarding any of these things because you’re only perpetuating other people’s suffering when you do—and you’re being unkind.

It takes so very little just to be  kind—but it’s costly too, which is why so few people actually care to attempt it.

Kindness might require you to surrender a political position you’re fully entrenched in, to give up a prejudice that you’ve always held tightly to, to admit your own fears and phobias toward people you’ve been conditioned to view as the enemy. You might need to confront your privilege or to reckon with injustice that you’ve benefitted from. You may have to hold your tongue or listen more or yield the floor—and you might have to give up being right in order to be kind, but it’s the better path.

Be kind to people, because every single person you share this planet with right now is going to die.

In less than 100 years they’ll be gone. They all have a finite amount of time here, and in that fleeting and fragile real estate they are doing the very best they can to hold it all together; to overcome their grief, to find open spaces of breath and moments of unfettered joy; to feel comfortable and accepted in their own skin; to experience times when they feel fully known and genuinely loved.

Help them all.

Help people find peace and belonging and rest—because you’re here and because you easily can.

Stop avoiding what you already know to be the answer to all that afflicts us:

Just be kind.

Get John’s book, ‘Hope and Other Superpowers’ HERE.

If you call your local cable provider to order service, at some point in the conversation the customer service representative will invariably make you an offer. He or she will tell you that if you’d like to also add Internet and Phone, that they can package these services and make them much more affordable than if you purchased them separately or elsewhere. This is what is known in the industry as bundling. Everyone knows that life is always more convenient when you bundle.

This week I’ll be turning 50 years old and I’m more than a little embarrassed to say that it took far too many of those years to even begin to understand that as a white, cisgender-heterosexual man born in America who identifies as Christian—that I have the Privilege Bundle. It was pre-paid long before I arrived here. I was grandfathered in (or great, great, great-grandfathered in, to be more accurate). The color of my skin, my gender, my orientation, my profession of faith, and my very physicality—have all buffered me from many varieties of adversity that others experience as daily existence, they’ve formed a barrier against a great deal of the struggles common to many, they’ve opened doors for me they I never realized had been opened, and they’ve afforded me a vast multitude of advantages—some of which I’ll become of aware of and others (despite my best efforts) that I’ll remain oblivious to. I have been the beneficiary of inequity since I was born.

But that wasn’t the story I would have told you through the first few decades of my life. For much of that time I lived with a set of assumptions based largely on the particular arrangement of my privilege bundle—and the religion I was raised in that reinforced it all.

I would have told you that anyone who wanted to work hard had the same opportunities to succeed—even though I often didn’t work very hard and still somehow managed to usually find a good deal of success.

I would have said that everyone had equal access to an education—all while attending a private school many couldn’t afford, with two parents who were present and fully engaged in my life, never wanting for a meal or clothes or transportation or the conditions that allowed me to thrive.

I would have told you that anyone who followed the rules and obeyed the law and respected law enforcement would have nothing to fear during a traffic stop—yet I can distinctly remember being in backseat of our car when my father was pulled over for speeding in a school zone, and before the officer even reached the window, my father yelling “Just give me the f*ckin’ ticket!”—and he just gave my father the f*ckin’ ticket, and off we went.

Even though so much of my experiential evidence testified loudly in opposition to my working assumptions about the world, I had a death grip on those assumptions because I benefitted from them. I held tightly to the story of equality that I needed to be true in order to continue unaffected. I rationalizes away evidence of racism or homophobia or misogyny, I made excuses for the injustices around me, and I lived without urgency in the face of incredible brutalities.

This is the seductive power of privilege: The more you benefit from a system, the easier it is to defend that system. The greater advantages the status quo provides you, the more tempted you’ll be to subconsciously resist changes in it. When you’ve always had the best and most comfortable seat at the table, it’s really difficult to imagine that there are people excluded from it. When you are an inequity beneficiary—equity often isn’t a priority.

This is why white Conservative Christians are so happy right now, why they are loudly or secretly applauding what’s happening in America, why they are silent in the presence of so much obvious inequity. It isn’t because of abortion or the economy or nationalism. It’s because their religious worldview is built largely on an inequitable theology; on the fraudulent premise that God is a cisgender-heterosexual white dude, who was born in America, identifies as Christian, and votes Republican.

With this as their default operating system, they are going to intentionally or subconsciously perpetuate injustice against those who don’t fit such descriptions. It’s also why they will vehemently resist changes that bring balance to a nation that has been tipped in their favor for hundreds of years. When the God you see in your head looks, loves, sounds, and worships like you—it’s easy to ignore cruelty directed toward people who don’t look, love, sound, and worship like you.

Until white Christians (specifically white, cisgender-hetero men) fully recognize the realities of the privilege they are born into, and confront the distorted theology of a faith tradition that reinforces them—they are going to continue to be fine with a system that damages vulnerable communities and nurtures inequality. They will abide a growing theocracy that openly discriminates against people of color and LGBTQ human beings and women. They will continue to be happy while the house is burning down.