Beautiful Colors

I feel powerless, too.

It’s one thing to reform immigration or foreign policy—we need both—but this is something else. The stop work order organizations like mine received is a dark betrayal to thousands of American workers and to vulnerable people who are vetted allies to our nation. Many are persecuted Christians. No matter how you slice it, our leaders have acted in unnecessarily dysfunctional, cruel ways. Which sadly, may just be the point.

I left to teach in Vietnam in 2004. Having given over 20 years of my life to humanitarian work, there’s so much to unpack. But the hardest part of all of this for me is the American church’s complicit role in helping these ugly, selfish cultural shifts surface.

Although there are political implications, this isn’t about politics for me. It’s about a power movement that has feigned Christianity to exploit fears and take control. A phony squatter has found a cozy home inside the church.

“The difference is that the church stands up and says that she knows God” says psychologist Diane Langberg, a line that keeps haunting me.

My kids asked some hard questions on MLK this year as we read about his life and times. “Why didn’t people do anything, Dad?”

A flash of anger rose in me, remembering how little I knew of him at their age. All I learned about MLK in my little Christian school was the claim he stirred up trouble among the people, and had a sexually impure life.

And here we are, on MLK Day in 2025, inaugurating a man whose personal life has been wholly immoral, a convicted felon who faked business records from payments to a porn star. Here we are, inaugurating again a man who does stir up the people—who lies to them nearly every time he is in public—so much so that they attacked our Congress, shouting death threats and urinating in the halls.

The difference is that the church stands up and says that she knows God.

The religious of Christ’s day had also given into fear, valuing the economy more than people made in God’s image. At this, He erupted in anger and tore the temple apart. They were enraged as he turned over their money tables and when “the blind and the lame came to Jesus at the temple, and he healed them.” (Matthew 21)

If you’ve left the church, I cannot blame you. I’d love to process this with you, share stories, and even read a book of the Bible together if you’re up for it. Searching it for myself has been light in these confusing times.

This year has brought a strange reversal. Even as we at World Relief face layoffs in refugee resettlement and our church prepares neighbors for heightened immigration enforcement, an unexpected hope and affirmation wells within me. The overwhelming support and solidarity from Christians and allies across the U.S. has strengthened my resolve. People young and old who refuse to stay silent, choosing instead to make their legacy one of truth and love.

My pastors too have doubled down on their commitment to welcome and love our immigrant neighbors. So many of you have reached out with messages of support and care. And our staff—how they’ve moved my heart. Even when suddenly furloughing dozens of them, their main concern has been sustaining the vulnerable refugees we serve whom the government has stranded. One donor told us this month: I marvel at how World Relief staff are so motivated that they won’t abandon their refugee clients, even though you weren’t given the promised resources.

I can’t tell you how much this means to me personally. It has been healing for me to see people of faith willing to stand up and choose the narrow way. They draw from a deeper well. They’re willing to be misunderstood, even scorned, for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.

They say when times are tough, people’s true colors come out. In the midst of so much chaos and harm, I have seen some beautiful colors emerge.

Thanks be to God.