I have many reasons for not getting what a somnologist or sleep doctor would describe as a full night’s rest.
For one, I have children. This means my ears are attuned to any sound slightly resembling a croup-like cough. In the winter months, this leads to other nights where, in our sought-after season of disinfectants, I battle stomach bugs that would make The Exocist’s Linda Blair blush. On those strange stretches where no child is sniffling or carrying around a fever, I invoke the mantra of Ernest Tubbs: walking the floors of our home while putting away clean dishes and folding a never-ending pile of laundry.
Even when my housekeeping duties end, more adulthood responsibilities demand my attention. Checking and double-checking online banking statements to ensure the funds wind up where they’re supposed to go. Making sure the magnetic calendar on the fridge matches the one on my smartphone. I do such things while sitting alone at a kitchen island. I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I’m sure I forgot.
Justin Cox
By the time I sneak back into bed, you’d think I’d be beaten down to the point of crashing face-first into a cold pillow. However, my mind is lit up like the radiant glow of a refrigerator light with existential questions. Solving nothing and coming no closer to understanding myself, I move on to my favorite pastime: worrying. I’m in no short supply of stressful material.
Not surprised
Let me be clear here: I am not surprised by the actions of these Divided States of America’s president. They have not caught me off guard. No, the individual who Justin Jones, the Democratic representative from the state of Tennessee, labeled as the “Grand Wizard and Chief” during a hearing earlier this month is doing precisely what many believed he would do.
Unleashing a blitzkrieg of executive orders targeting the removal of DEI programs, enforcing Gestapo-level border and immigration policies, the freezing of federal funding, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organizations and the Paris Climate Agreement (again), the pardoning of January 6 rioters, and signing an order stating there are only two sexes, male and female. Per the document, “These sexes are not changeable and grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
In this same reality, the Gulf of Mexico has been updated to the Gulf of America, nepotist politician turned medical expert Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the secretary of Health and Human Services, war pig Pete Hegseth is now second in command over the nation’s military, and somehow, somehow I ask you, the producer of the most underwhelming and least efficient “truck” of all time, billionaire and Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, is now running the Department of Government Efficiency.
All aboard the Trump Train
“Call it a wreck if you will, but the truth is the Trump Train has been two things: busy and organized.”
Call it a wreck if you will, but the truth is the Trump Train has been two things: busy and organized. Eerily on point with the plans of Project 2025, something Trump claimed during the 2024 presidential debate he had no hand in and knew little about.
While some voices continue to shout and point to these actions as signs of democracy’s end, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt last week suggested to a room of reporters in true propagandist fashion that the cause of the constitutional crisis lies elsewhere: “The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges and liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority.”
Pointing fingers, misdirection and bold accusations are tactics I’ve come to expect from this administration since 2017.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the outright coronation of a would-be king that the White House media team would plaster all over social media on Wednesday. In the image, Trump smiles in a suit, tie and American flag lapel pin. A skyline of a George Wallace dreamed of America rises behind him. On his head sits a crown, the attire of the divine right to rule. If the symbolism isn’t clear enough, four words stand in bold white in the bottom left corner. LONG LIVE THE KING.
‘This is not a drill’
Last night, as that image stared back at me from my phone screen, I heard the words of a fellow Baptist minister, Co’Relous Bryant, who, after the election of Trump in November shared a sermon with their congregation titled “This Is Not A Drill!” Those words have been echoing in my soul ever since. Sleep would not come because I kept asking myself, “What will I say and do now?”
“Sleep would not come because I kept asking myself, ‘What will I say and do now?'”
As a pastor who has been in congregational ministry for more than a decade, I am well aware of the perceptions around my role. I am to lead worship on Sundays, visit the sick and dedicate babies. I marry and bury those I know and love and those I’ve never met. I baptize young and old and preside over the Lord’s Supper. I am asked to pray at every meal I’m invited to and facilitate Bible studies. My opinion is requested, if not always heeded, at committee meetings. These expectations are spoken aloud. Many of them are in pastor profiles or church bylaws. To be a pastor yesterday, today and tomorrow, such functions must be conducted in some way or another.
And yet, I cannot help but wonder if another Bible study on the authorship of the Apostle Paul’s epistles is what a local church needs right now. Or if a congregation needs to sit through another sermon series highlighting the importance of faithful stewardship. Is conducting business as usual doing churches any favors? Is the desire to remain complacent, work to put butts in the pews, build up and securely hold onto an endowment the kin-dom work I gave my life to when I confessed to following the lowly Galilean, Jesus, who preached the Sermon on the Plain?
I don’t think so.
Instead of trying to exegete the book of Revelation, my time would be better spent focusing on organizing community patrols for those threatened by ICE raids. Instead of sweating building funds, I should turn my attention to helping raise funds for those who thought they had a job until the White House issued a freeze on all vacant federal positions. I should turn down comfortable conferences to join others marching in the streets opposing the idol of Christian nationalism. I should help organize sit-ins to end the injustices I see toward persecuted minority groups in this country.
I would not be alone trying to live out this call. Not too long ago, in the rearview mirror closeness of this country’s history, people of faith placed themselves in similar positions. Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement like King, Bayard Rustin and Fred Shuttlesworth proved there is power in organizing. The reverb of Shuttlesworth’s work still permeates the city I serve in now, as he and others helped lead a group of 26 students from William Penn High School in protesting the evils of segregation at their local Woolworth counter in 1960, just days after the four college students from North Carolina A&T did the same.
“My role is always to dissent and outright refute any politician or president who would try to appoint themselves as king.”
I attended the 65th anniversary of those brave high school students on Feb. 11 of this year. Some of those who sat at that counter are still alive. Proof that divine dissenters continue to walk among us.
There are others, too. Anne Braden, Howard “Buck” Kester, Aubrey Williams, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Alva Taylor and Claude Clossey Williams, to name but a few. They worked in what Clarence Jordan referred to as the God Movement. Addressing the powers and principalities of their day. Calling attention to civil rights and labor advocacy. Forming and supporting groups like the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Displaying the work of a minister and the faithful did not rest solely behind a pulpit or inside a sanctuary.
I think of all this as I lie in bed and pray such activism will one day become the expectation of a preacher. Mentioned right beside public prayer and sermon writing.
This notion gives me peace before drifting off. This, and the idea that to be a Baptist minister means my role is always to dissent and outright refute any politician or president who would try to appoint themselves as king. That gets a holy “hell no” from me. My pedigree demands such a statement.
I expect that much of my call and of myself. I hope many others will, too.
Justin Cox received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity and is currently enrolled in the doctor of ministry program at McAfee School of Theology. He is an ordained minister holding standing in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches USA. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. His thoughts and reflections are his own.
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