Growing up and later ministering in the Church, the elemental heart of spiritual community was the stated or implicit sense that we alone had cracked the God code; that we’d figured out what every other faith tradition (and many communities within our tradition) had not. Evangelism was less about sharing God’s love with the world around us but about getting the world to be as enlightened as we were by completely agreeing with us.

Believing the right thing was everything. The world was sharply divided between the saved and the damned and the greatest imaginable sin was to reject that idea. And it wasn’t enough to believe in God, you had to believe in the correct God, adopt the correct doctrine, and pray the correct prayers—or else your sincerity or judgment (not to mention, your eternal destination) were questioned.

One of the perennial party lines from my megachurch days was “Being a good person isn’t going to get you into Heaven, only accepting Jesus will”—as if God so preferred some 90-second lip service over a long life of kindness, that He would send a loving Muslim to hell while eternally rewarding a horrible human being who once answered an altar call. That seemed like an odd thing for a God who is all-knowing and all-loving to do. That seemed antithetical to love. And this theology has produced some really unloving people who are certain they have their ticket to heaven punched.

Since beginning this work as a pastor nearly three decades ago. I’ve encountered millions of people of faith who believe religion is a hard pass-fail, and they are terrified of flunking. At this point in the journey, I don’t wrestle with that idea much anymore.

The answer to the question, “Do I have religion right?” is actually quite simple to me now, and when people ask me I tell them why.

The right religious worldview is the one that makes you a more empathetic human being—period. It is the belief system that enables you to be more aware of the suffering in the world and propels you into other people’s lives to alleviate that suffering.

For half a decade, Republicans—especially self-described moderate members of the party—have been gaslighting America on the issue of abortion rights, pretending they didn’t know that Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks were always planning to overturn Roe. A central goal of the conservative judicial movement that these justices came out of is overturning Roe. The Federalist Society handpicked them for that reason. It’s a transparently phony act, one that’s now been exposed as such.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, for example, tried to convince everyone that she genuinely believed Brett Kavanaugh would let Roe stand, despite all evidence to the contrary. “Protecting [the right to an abortion] is important to me,” Collins told The New York Times after a two-hour, face-to-face session with Kavanaugh during which, she said, he convinced her that he would not overturn Roe. “His views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly.” Collins said that Kavanaugh assured her Roe was “settled law,” and that his answer on Roe was “very strong,” though he had openly criticized the decision in a speech, used the anti-abortion lingo “abortion on demand,” and voted more than once as a federal judge against reproductive rights.

By opposing abortion, religious people can feel the intoxicating, easy high of self-righteousness and moral virtue—without having to actually love or help people: strange, disparate, uncomfortable-for- you-to-be-around people. That’s because embryos can be idealized into something pleasant and palatable, devoid of any of the messy characteristics they find undesirable in actual walking-around human beings. They aren’t yet gay or Muslim or liberal or Black or poor or atheist (or whatever other qualifiers trouble you), and so affinity with them is uncomplicated, solidarity with them does not cross the lines of their tribalism.

Anti-abortion believers get to feel like noble advocates for Life, while still holding onto their prejudices and hang-ups and hatred. They can dispense all kinds of cruelty and expose human beings to staggering forms of bigotry—and still say they’re defending the living. Once these embryos are no longer embryos, these supposed life-lovers often don’t treat them as though they’re even human. Unless these lives conform to the narrowest and most stringent of criteria, they’re more often considered threats to be neutralized, enemies to be overtaken, and adversaries to be destroyed. When embryos become LGBTQ teenagers, terrified migrants, young black men, people dying of COVID, sick middle-aged adults with astronomical bills, the working poor, Muslims—suddenly, these lives seem far less sacred to them.

Millions of us in love, promises made good
Your own flesh and blood
Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart's drum together with another one
Didn't you think anyone loved you

And I knew since I was just little
The sharp edges of the world will whittle
Your dreams down to shavings at your feet

In a quiet room, we can find stillness. And in that stillness, we can contemplate our own mind.

What we often find is that the mind is very restless. It wants to take care of a thousand things, because it’s feeling some uncertainty and fear. It wants to fix problems, take care of all the undone things, figure out if everything is going to be OK. It wants to get all of our needs met, from survival needs to meaning, connection and love.

The mind is restless, wanting to fix everything, get everything it needs.

What if we could allow our minds to rest, settling into the full sufficiency of itself just as it is?

We would need nothing in each moment, other than what’s required for physical survival. That doesn’t mean we do nothing (though we could!) — beyond our needs, there might be a wholehearted desire to do some good for ourselves or others, but it doesn’t have to come from fear.

There’s a settledness, a peace, that can come with this kind of practice.

There’s a feeling that we are enough. That everything we need is already contained in us.

It’s a lifetime practice.

Here’s how I recommend starting:

Go and sit, practice, and let me know what you find!

Summertime,

And the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin'

And the cotton is high

Your daddy's rich

And your mamma's good lookin'

So hush little baby

Don't you cry

One of these mornings

You're going to rise up singing

Then you'll spread your wings

And you'll take to the sky

But till that morning

There's a'nothing can harm you

With daddy and mamma standing by

Callin' out around the world
Are you ready for a brand new beat
Summer's here and the time is right
For dancing in the street

Cryptocurrencies are about to change everything the way the internet changed everything in the late '90s. We're in the early stages of another round of massive cultural upheaval that’ll be even bigger than the Web, social media, and the smartphone. You won't recognize the world in ten years — 2031 will be even further from 2021 than 2011 is.

Yes, I have drunk the crypto Kool-Aid in a big way. And in this post, I hope to show the curious and the skeptics what I see in the blockchain. Hopefully, at least my Kool-Aid drinking will make some sense by the time you're done with this, even if you're not personally convinced.