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.”
“Caleb,” Elijah said, low and steady, already on his feet. “Look at me.”
Caleb’s eyes found his like a man grabbing a railing in a storm.
“Breathe,” Elijah said. “We’re going. But we’re going with control. Your kids need you steady.”
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.
“‘Examine everything carefully’ wasn’t written for machines—it was written for us (1 Thessalonians 5:21).”
“Matthew 18 doesn’t start with a post. It starts with a private conversation.”