Jeremiah didn’t fear Christopher’s questions. He feared wasting the moment with quick answers that never reached the heart. Tonight wasn’t about winning; it was about opening the Book and letting Scripture do what it always does—separate truth from noise.
Kyle exhaled. “Church people can be… a lot.”
Jeremiah didn’t argue. “That’s a real experience. But the problem wasn’t being around God’s people—it was being around a version of God’s people who forgot what they were supposed to be.”
Barbara didn’t doom-scroll. She didn’t argue online. She simply turned her phone face down, pulled a sheet of paper toward her, and wrote the sentence that kept coming back like a warning: A Republic Can’t Run on Lies.
Barbara slid her phone across the table at The Shepherds Cafe. “I’m tired of narratives replacing truth,” she said. Elijah and Jeremiah didn’t rant. They opened Scripture and built a simple filter for every headline.