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Hey you guys. This is Heidi St. John. Welcome to the Heidi St. John Podcast. Today is Friday, June 5th. This is episode number 933. And we’re going to talk a little bit today about what’s going on in the culture, and how we can stay above it as Christians and be ambassadors for the Lord. Stick around, I think you’re going to be encouraged.

So thanks for tuning in today. Wow, you guys. Wow. There’s a part of me, I was telling my husband on the way into the studio today, there’s a part of me that has been so broken, really so broken hearted in the past couple of months that it’s causing me to just really do some soul searching. And I know a lot of you guys are in that same position, and we’re going to talk a little bit about what’s happening in the culture today. But the goal is to kind of offer some encouragement from God’s Word, a little bit of perspective. We need perspective. I have never seen such a grab for control of a narrative, and ultimately control of a nation, in all my life. And I think it’s easy for us to lose sight of what’s happening. We had the Rona, which you guys have been hearing me talk about now for months, the scamdemic, this horrific really, attack on our sanity.

I mean, we’re gripped in fear. I’ve been at the beach for several days. My sister has, her family has a beach home and they’ve been gracious enough to let Jay and I go there with our three younger kids and just hit the reset button. I had to stop checking my messages on Facebook, stop reading the comments on the posts that I’ve been trying to bring a little bit of reason to this. And my efforts have been met with people screaming that I’m a racist, people saying I don’t know anything about anything. And I just have never seen anything like this in my whole life. And so I want to sort of take us back to where this all started, because I think my husband and I and our kids were talking about this in the car a little bit today because we drove from the Oregon coast into Vancouver so that I could record in the studio.

And as we were driving, we were talking about what this is doing. So the Coronavirus, and now we’ve got the death of George Floyd that the nation’s on fire, right? You know the nations on fire when the President can stand up in front of a church that’s been looted and burned and Christian leaders criticized the President for standing in front of the church… and not the people who rioted and looted and burned the church. And we got some soul searching to do, absolutely have some soul searching to do. And so I thought, well, I’m going to take you guys back a couple of days. And I know a lot of you. So there’s a lot of you are new to the podcast. You found me either on social media or wherever.

And so I have been, I will rarely, rarely, rarely talk about race on my podcast. Sometimes I’ll have people. On my friend, Kathy Barnette is a woman who is running, a black woman, running for Congress in her home state of Pennsylvania, she’s a good friend of mine. I’ve had conversations with her about this. People sometimes get on my page and say, “You need to talk to a black person.” Oh, okay. So I do that because I think, “Well maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe I need to get out of my circle a little bit. Maybe I don’t have enough black friends.” You guys, this is not about race in the same way that the Rona is not about a virus. Okay? We’re being attacked on every level right now, every level. Truth is what is being attacked right now.

And the truth is we are citizens, most of us, of the United States of America, and this is a power grab. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. So we need to sort of hit the recalibrate button. So a lot of you guys are following me online. I’ve been doing this thing at 7:14 every morning. And some of you guys are mistaking me for a morning person. A morning person I am not. I am more of a mid morning person. And so committing to getting up every day at 6:30 AM to have something to write, something to pray about has been challenging me, but here’s what’s really cool. I started setting my alarm for 6:30 weeks ago, right when we started the 7:14 AM prayer time. And I think I wrote on my Facebook page that for the first week it was just torture.

Okay, yeah— the second week wasn’t much fun either because I’m out of the habit of getting up. I mean it takes discipline to get up and talk to the Lord in the morning, write out what I’m learning. And I realize I’ve been struggling really with what I would say a mild depression because I’m just having a hard time getting out of bed. I mean, I travel and speak for a living. Normally I’m up at 3:00 AM, at least two, sometimes three, sometimes every weekend so that I can get on a plane and fly out of Portland, Oregon to wherever I’m supposed to be that weekend. And you’d think that 6:30 AM would feel like sleeping in for me since I’m used to getting up at 3AM. But since January, my life has just been completely upended. And I remember telling my husband in January “I never want to leave home again” because we’re gone so much.

Okay. So I take it back. I want to leave home. I want to get on an airplane. I want to do the thing that God’s created me to do and put me here on this Earth to do. And I realized that I’d become complacent about something that in reality, I very much enjoy. And that is speaking to people. It’s what the Lord has gifted me and called me to do. And I definitely took it for granted. So I wrote the other day “Thank you, Rona. God is using you to recalibrate my heart.” And I think a lot of us are in a position of having our hearts re-calibrated right now. We’re having to face things that we don’t like to face. We’re having to talk about things that we don’t like to talk about. And the crisis has devastated our churches. It’s definitely devastated my speaking season and thus my personal income.

It’s brought me to my knees emotionally and spiritually. It’s highlighted some sin issues in my life that were just starting, I think, to take root, ungratefulness maybe being one of them, taking for granted my ability to just go to church and not have to make a reservation, or think about the Rona. Right? And so I’m going to kind of offer a little bit of encouragement for you as you recalibrate during this, what I would say is an otherwise awful season. You guys God is the ultimate multitasker, and He’s at work. He’s at work right now. And He’s at work in our hearts as we realize the longer this thing drags. Isn’t it interesting? Are you guys, do you think it’s fascinating that the Rona doesn’t seem to be spreading where the rioters are? I have you guys stopped to think about that, because I think about it.

I thought that we weren’t supposed to go to church because the Rona, nevermind that we can go to Safeway, and nevermind we can go to Home Depot and Lowe’s, the Rona’s not there, but these people that are rioting, they’re not social distancing. I don’t see anybody freaking out about the new second wave that’s going to come in from the riots. You guys, I keep saying this, open your eyes. This is not about a virus. It is not about George Floyd. The left in this nation and people who literally hate this country, they hate the freedom that we have here in the United States. And they play on what I have heard many call our greatest weakness. And that is our desire to be kind, our need to be seen as good people.

And so in the interest of being good people, in the interest of following the law, whatever we stayed home, right? We flattened the curve until I realized, “Oh my goodness, this is not about flattening the curve. We’re now under house arrest.” And then when you stand up against it and you say, “Hey, something’s terribly wrong,” we see division in our churches, division in our families. And what’s happening is the Rona, this Coronavirus scam is unearthing a lot of things that we need to deal with.

So as I’m doing the 7:14 every morning, this call to prayer, the Lord has been just dealing with me like, “Heidi stop worrying about what everybody thinks of you with the comments they leave on Facebook.” I started screenshotting the things people say to me online. It is devastating. It’s absolutely devastating. And it’s highlighted for me the fact that the world feels a little bit darker right now. And we’re not used to this in Western civilization, we’re not. And I’m certainly not used to even somebody as outspoken as myself, I don’t like it when people threaten me, and curse at me, and tell me they wish I was dead. I don’t like that. And the Lord is saying, “What are you going to do Heidi? Are you going to keep your eyes on me? Are you going to let this thing sink you down into a pit?” And so I will encourage you because I know a lot of you listening to this right now are sinking down into a pit, and you’re frustrated, and you’re angry, and you’re tired of being called names. And nobody’s talking about the pandemic of abortion right now.

So the narrative’s being highlighted. And can I just say, I’m just going to encourage you guys to focus, focus, focus. We cannot let the media, who I trust zero— their narrative of the day is distracting us from what’s really happening in the nation. And we need to stand against it, right? To be united in our desire to see unity come. I criticized Black Lives Matter on my page the other day. I was at the beach, I didn’t even know anything about the Tuesday thing that everybody’s doing, the blackout thing. I didn’t know about it until I got a phone call. “Hey, are you going to make a statement?” I was at the ocean, so I had tried really hard. I mean, I get on in the morning, and I do a post, and I just walk away.

I have to just walk away. I’m still a mother like a lot of you women. Right? We still have marriages. We still got to get dinner on the table. In the midst of the Rona, and the rioting, and the fear, we still… we’ve got children to raise. And there are still other issues in the world. And so I had stepped away until I heard “This is happening. And people are wondering why you’re not talking about it.” And the more I researched it, I was like, “I don’t actually want to associate myself with that.” I was kind of disappointed with all of the Christian, the famous Christians, right, the pastors and worship leaders who are promoting Black Lives Matter and have no idea what Black Lives Matter actually stands for as an organization. They stand for the defunding of police departments. Most of you guys wouldn’t last five minutes in the inner city if the police weren’t there to protect us.

Are there racist police officers? Yes. But are the police racist? No. Black Lives Matter wants race based reparations, which is ridiculous on its face. They want voting rights for illegal aliens, an end to private education, universal income, black power, which is absolutely racist, and LGBTQ rights and empowerment. You guys, this is not an organization that Christians should be linking their arms with, it just isn’t. Do you know where Black Lives Matter gets their funding? George Soros, radical leftist donors who’s behind all this stuff. Absolutely. And what we’re doing is we’re taking the conversation and we’re saying that the problem is racism, but the problem in our nation, and I keep saying this, and I don’t know how to stop saying it, the problem in our nation is not systemic racism. It is systemic sin, and racism will be conquered when we repent of our sin and submit to the God who created us all equal in His image.

I called my friend Kathy, the other day, Kathy Barnette, who I told you is running for Congress. She’s a black woman running for Congress in the state of Pennsylvania. And I called her on my way into town. And I said, “Hey, am I wrong?” I said, “I’ve been told that because my skin is white, I cannot address the issue of racial injustice.” And I was so thankful for the opportunity to talk to her because she reminded me of what I already knew, that in the culture that we’re living in right now in this cancel culture, you say something someone doesn’t like, they cancel you. We’re not even listening to each other. And she said, “Heidi, you have every right to speak out. This is your country, you live here. I live here. And to tell someone that if they’re white, they can’t possibly understand the evil that is racism, they can’t even talk about it is the same thing that happens when we tell men that they have no right to talk about the evil and injustice of abortion, simply by virtue of the fact that they’re not women.”

That doesn’t make any sense at all. And you see the spirit of divisiveness and that what it is, it’s divisive. And I’m watching the movement that’s out there that has rightfully called out the evil of racism, absolutely. Right? God made us all in His image, but this is so much bigger than that. What’s happening is we’re playing on the pain of people, and they’re using it as a catalyst to bring destruction and division. And these organizations would shame you into promoting them. And ultimately, they’re not going to bring around healing. They’re going to bring around destruction. And so I posted it, and immediately I’m talking about this and people from, I mean, I had to just step away. And I came back a few hours later, and I just said, “You guys, I’m grieved. Open your eyes. The same people that pushed panic three months ago at the start of the Rona are behind this, more fear, more division, more hate.”

There are people who have literally been salivating at the opportunity that the death of George Floyd has given them to keep the nation in chaos and steeped in division. And believe me when I say they are not interested in reconciliation, racial or otherwise, this is about control. Yes, there are bad cops, and I’m with you. Let’s root them out. Let’s prosecute them to the full extent of the law, but let’s not make this a war against our men in blue, our men and women in blue, both black and white. There are bad doctors, doctors who have sexually abused children in their offices, teachers who have assaulted their students. There are bad people in literally every profession, lots of them.

So can we riot over that next? We’re buying the narrative of people who literally profit from our blindness and division. And I see this whole thing as another Me Too movement, the #MeToo movement, that solved nothing, nothing. I was speaking to a friend the other day about this on the phone. And we were talking about the similarities between how radical feminism has totally poisoned the original intent of women’s rights, right? The women’s suffrage movement, we started out wanting to be seen as equal to men in our everyday lives. We wanted the opportunity to vote. We wanted the opportunity to apply to colleges and universities that previously had kept women out. Now it’s been hijacked by radical feminism. Now it’s a shameful, embarrassing movement that hates men. And I will not associate myself with a feminist movement because I see how broken and divisive it’s become in the same way Black Lives Matter is poisoning the narrative around a very real fight against a very real evil that is racism. And now it is doing more harm than good.

The same people who say that men have no voice when it comes to abortion are going to say that white people cannot address the issue of racism. They push a false narrative. It seeks to marginalize and divide. And this is what I want you guys to hear. Our voices matter, because truth and healing should be the ultimate goal, that’s what we should be after. When truth is reached, justice is found there. You can’t find justice without truth. Justice, honors truth, regardless of skin color. And for everyone who got on my page and called me racist, and said I hate hated black people, and it wounded me to my core because people who know me in my life, particularly my black friends who I’ve had forever and ever are like “What is going on?” I’ll tell you what’s going on. This is a spirit of division as I live and breathe, and it’s not going to last forever. I am praying that there will be a movement of reconciliation in this nation, and we don’t get to reconciliation by pinning this on the police.

We need to look deeper than that into our hearts. Lord, what is happening around us? We can be a part of healing and to bring hope. Our families are being systematically attacked from the inside out. And that’s the way the adversary always works, from the inside out. I saw a headline the other day in The Jerusalem Post. I don’t know if you guys have seen it, but a headline in The Jerusalem Post, and I’ll link back to it in the show notes today. It’s on my Instagram. I thought this was fascinating stuff. And here is what the headline reads. It says, remember, this is the Jerusalem post “Iran, Russia, China, and Turkey are celebrating the imminent collapse of the United States,” people who are cheering for our nation to descend into chaos and division. This is the adversary, and we need to see it for what it is.

You guys, don’t let people tell you that your voice doesn’t matter because of the color of your skin. That in and of itself is racism. If I were to ever say to one of my black friends, “You can’t know how I feel, or you can’t talk about this conversation because you’re black and I’m white,” then that makes me a racist. We’re human beings made in the image of God who need to do a better job of listening to each other. But this is not the way, it’s not the way. I’m praying for healing, and we need it desperately.

And I hope that as you guys enter into conversations with people around you, don’t be shamed into silence on either side of this because of the color of your skin. Unless and until we stop pushing this narrative, we’re going to continue to fall into this trap. And it is a trap. The Bible teaches us that God does not see us as either Greek or Jew, slave or free. He sees us as men and women who are made in his image and He loves us. And He sent His son to die for us, each of us. The Bible says, each of us have gone our own way, sinners desperately in need of a savior. And until we come to the place where we’re humble enough to say, “Lord, help me. I’m broken,” all these things are distractions.

And I am praying with all my heart that God brings us around first as a church so that we can minister hope and healing to a nation and to a world that desperately needs it. I received an email from a listener in Ethiopia the other day. And he was saying that here in the United States, they are watching. And many of them are desperate to live here because there they are systematically oppressed in Ethiopia. And he said, “It’s almost like the people in your country have forgotten what they have, what God has given them.” And I think that’s absolutely right. So I just want to encourage you guys to keep using your voice. Our voices matter, especially the voices that are speaking for truth, especially the voices who are willing to listen. I’m going to leave you with one other thought.

I wrote about this on my Facebook page the other day that a bird had woken me up. We’ve been staying at the ocean. Like I said, a bird had woken me up. It wasn’t like the sweet musical kind. It was a squawker right, like right outside my window, just this bird just squawking away. And it kind of puts you in a bad mood because the bird wasn’t saying anything worth listening to. I could handle being awoken by a sweet chirp, right, even if it was an hour before I wanted to get up, but a squawk. No thanks. And there’s a whole lot of squawking going on right now. A whole lot of yucky, pointless noise. And Paul understood a noisy culture. He was trying to wake up the church in Corinth, as they had become a sin ridden, complacent, bunch of Christian squawkers just like that bird outside my window.

And in first Corinthians 13, Paul reminded the church of an important truth. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but I don’t have love, I’m only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol,” meaning no one will want to listen to our words if they’re not said with love. So when we speak, when we engage, especially now, our words have to carry a message of truth and love. And we can do that. We can speak the truth in love, through the power of the Holy Spirit. For years, I’ve been talking about what I’ve observed in the church, as it has sacrificed truth on the altar of a misguided mercy. This is also not love. Love tells the truth. And you guys, my prayer for us today is that our words would be seasoned with love. Hard truth is easier to hear when love is there. Now sometimes we’re going to do our best, and our words are going to be seasoned with love and full of truth, and we’re going to be rejected anyway. And Jesus knew this, right? He understood it. His Words were the best kind.

And what did he get for the message he brought? He was killed by an angry mob who’d been blinded by their own sin, and had their minds darkened, but Jesus brought the message anyway. And so friends, as we go into the weekend, we don’t know what’s going to happen, right? Any 24 hour news cycles, man, it’s crazy what’s going on. The weekend could bring bad news. It could present us with a thousand opportunities to sow division and discord. And so my prayer for us is that we handle whatever comes our way with love, no squawking. We need to speak in love. 

Father I ask right now that you would help us as we navigate this crazy upside down world. Lord, give us mercy, give us strength, help us not to squawk, but rather to sing. And may our song be one of hope and healing, full of grace and truth. Give us opportunity to speak, Lord. And when we do, may they be your words. And Father, if those words are rejected, if our hearts are broken and our messages scorned, bind our wounds and keep our hearts soft in the midst of all of this so that we can have a heart like Jesus. Father, we pray the words in Psalm 19. May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, oh Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. I want to thank you guys for listening.

Thanks for journeying with me, through all of this stuff. We really appreciate it. I thank you so much. I know a lot of you’ve been getting onto Amazon and leaving reviews for the books I’ve written. Thank you very much for doing that. In a season where I am not on the road, I have been very, very grateful for those of you who are helping promote the ministry. If you’ve not joined me over at MomStrong International, we’re in the middle of a summer series right now. Actually we just started last week, and I think you’ll really love it. It’s called Even Now… Stand. And we’re going to be studying the lives of men and women who followed God in difficult circumstances. And I think you guys are going to be blessed and encouraged. So I want to encourage you today. Stay faithful as my friend Bill Jack would say, keep your armor on, and your heart soft. God’s still on his throne and he’s still at work. Thanks for listening you guys.