The morning air inside The Shepherds Cafe carried that early-January stillness—soft jazz low enough to disappear into the clink of mugs, a few tired greetings at the counter, and the slow hush of people easing back into routine. Outside, winter light pressed against the windows like a pale hand, and the bare trees stood in quiet lines across the street.
Elijah sat nearest the glass, glasses perched low, his short white beard catching the warm café light. Jeremiah—an older Black man with a salt-and-pepper beard—sat across from him, shoulders squared but heavy, hands around his mug like he was holding steady against something that wanted to shake him. Barbara slid in beside them with her phone already unlocked, her face set in a way that wasn’t just concern—it was disappointment mixed with disgust.
“I don’t like reading this stuff first thing,” she said, lowering the phone onto the table. “But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.”
Elijah didn’t reach for the phone immediately. He watched Barbara’s hand linger on it, as if the device itself might stain the table. “Go ahead,” he said. “What are we looking at?”
Barbara angled the screen so all three could see. The story was about fraud tied to child-care funding—money that’s supposed to protect children and support working parents. Not a theoretical debate. Not a partisan talking point. Just the ugly reality of people learning how to exploit a system built for the vulnerable.
Jeremiah’s eyes tightened as he read. He didn’t speak at first. He breathed in slowly through his nose, the way a man does when he’s trying not to let anger drive the car. Elijah finally leaned in, and Barbara scrolled, her finger sharp and impatient, stopping only when she found the parts that sounded like consequences instead of commentary.
“They’re tightening controls,” Barbara said. “They’re demanding proof before money goes out—justification and receipts or even photo evidence, and the documentation they’re asking for includes attendance records, licensing, inspection and monitoring reports, complaints, investigations. That’s not a casual request. That’s what you do when you believe the system has been played.”
Elijah’s mouth went thin. “When oversight has to become this strict, it’s because somebody trained themselves to steal without flinching.”
Jeremiah set his mug down with both hands, careful, controlled. “Fraud is theft with clean shoes,” he said. “Same heart as breaking into a house, just wearing a button-down and carrying a clipboard.”
Barbara nodded, then pulled up something else—an audit summary from federal inspectors that had looked at Minnesota’s childcare assistance payments. “It isn’t guesswork,” she said. “They sampled two hundred payments from 2023, and they found attendance-related noncompliance issues in thirty-eight of them. Thirty-eight. In a random sample. That’s not a one-off mistake. That’s a pattern that tells you the guardrails aren’t holding.”
Elijah exhaled, slow, like he was trying to keep grief from turning into cynicism. “And that’s where the spiritual danger spreads,” he said. “First, the thief gets numb. Then the public gets numb. Then the people who should care most start saying, ‘That’s just how it is.’ And the moment we accept that, we’ve surrendered more than money—we’ve surrendered our moral nerve.”
Jeremiah stared at the phone again. “The worst part is how predictable the progression is,” he said. “Small dishonesty becomes bigger dishonesty. Then dishonesty becomes a lifestyle. Then a lifestyle becomes a conscience that doesn’t work. And when the conscience stops working, people will do evil with a straight face and sleep like a baby.”
Barbara’s jaw tightened. “And people keep telling me, ‘Nothing ever happens,’” she said. “Like justice is a fairy tale.”
Jeremiah lifted his eyes. “That part is wrong,” he said. “Sentences happen. Restitution happens. Convictions happen.”
Elijah nodded once. “Accountability exists. But it has to be pursued. It doesn’t happen automatically.”
Barbara scrolled again and found what Jeremiah meant. A man connected to a major Minnesota fraud prosecution had been sentenced to ten years in prison and ordered to pay $47,920,514 in restitution. Ten years. Nearly forty-eight million dollars. The numbers were so large they almost felt unreal—until you remembered what those funds were meant to do. Feed children. Support families. Serve people who don’t have time to play games with paperwork because they’re trying to survive the week.
Jeremiah’s voice lowered. “That’s what hardened sin looks like—when a person can steal at that scale and still think they’re clever,” he said. “And it wasn’t just a little creative accounting. The prosecution described massive claims—millions upon millions of meals—while many locations allegedly weren’t serving meals at all. Some sites were described as nothing more than parking lots or vacant spaces. That’s not confusion. That’s deliberate deception.”
Barbara’s disgust showed in the way she pulled her hand back from the phone, like she didn’t want to touch it anymore. “And then regular people see this enough times that they stop being shocked,” she said. “They stop expecting justice. They stop reporting. They stop demanding accountability. They just roll their eyes and move on.”
Elijah looked out the window for a moment, watching a mother guide a child across the sidewalk. The child hopped over the cracks in the pavement like it was a game. Elijah’s voice was quiet when he turned back. “That is the victory of corruption,” he said. “Not when criminals commit crime. When decent people decide justice isn’t worth the trouble.”
Jeremiah nodded. “Numbness is permission,” he said. “And it’s dangerous because it feels clean. People think, ‘I’m not involved.’ But refusing to care about justice is not righteousness. It’s surrender.”
Barbara scrolled one more time, and her face shifted from anger to something closer to sorrow. “And then it spills over,” she said. “Daycare workers getting threatened. Places getting targeted. There was a reported break-in at a Somali-owned daycare—someone broke through a concrete wall and stole sensitive documents, including children’s enrollment information.”
Jeremiah’s expression tightened. “That’s the spiral,” he said. “Fraud poisons a system, and then fear poisons a neighborhood. People stop distinguishing between evidence and rumor. Justice gets replaced by chaos. And innocent families get dragged into it.”
Elijah held up a hand, not to stop the conversation, but to steady it. “We’re not called to chaos,” he said. “And we’re not called to cowardice either. Fraud is sin. It is theft. It is exploitation. It damages the victims and corrodes the thief. But the answer is not mob behavior, and it’s not scapegoating whole communities. The answer is lawful accountability, clean speech, and courage.”
Barbara looked at them both. “So how do we talk about this without being swallowed by it?” she asked. “Because I can feel it—the temptation to either rage or shut down.”
Jeremiah’s hands folded together, firm. “You keep your conscience alive,” he said. “You refuse to normalize dishonesty in your own life. You refuse to excuse it in others. You support real oversight, real audits, and real prosecutions when the evidence is there. And you refuse to become unjust while you’re demanding justice.”
Elijah leaned forward slightly, his disappointment plain. “This is exactly why the book of Judges is so haunting,” he said. “It describes a society sliding into disorder because people rejected God’s order. Scripture says, ‘Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.’ That isn’t freedom. That is the seedbed of chaos. When truth becomes personal preference, when right and wrong become private property, the strong take what they want and the vulnerable pay the bill.”
Jeremiah nodded slowly. “And fraud is ‘right in my own eyes’ with a pen,” he said. “It’s self-rule pretending to be professionalism.”
Barbara picked up her phone and turned it face down on the table.
“Then let’s not shrug,” she said. “Let’s pray for the children caught in the middle, for honest providers who are now under suspicion because others sinned, for investigators to have backbone, for courts to have clarity, and for thieves to either repent or be stopped. Because mercy matters, but justice matters too—and pretending otherwise is how hearts go numb.”
Elijah nodded. Jeremiah nodded.
And in that corner booth of The Shepherds Cafe, three older believers did something simple that most people won’t do for long: they stayed awake. They stayed tender. They refused to let repeated wrongdoing train them into indifference.
Because the easiest sin in the world is numbness.
And it ruins more than thieves.