Quiet Time: A Better Political Imagination

Look at the company Jesus kept in Luke 8. There's Joanna — wife of Chuza, the man who managed Herod's household budget. She knew the marble floors of the palace, the political maneuvering, the way empire operates from the inside. And she walked away from that table to follow a homeless rabbi through dusty Galilean villages. That's not naïveté. That's a woman who saw both worlds and chose the one where power flows downward.

The Anabaptist tradition has always understood something the rest of the church sometimes forgets: the kingdom of God is not a metaphor. It is an actual, breathing community where former insiders like Joanna and former outcasts like Mary Magdalene share the same road, the same bread, the same purpose. Jesus didn't reform Herod's court. He built something entirely different — a traveling household where women funded the mission, the broken were made whole, and nobody had to bow to Caesar to belong.

A better political imagination doesn't start in a voting booth or a policy paper. It starts in a quiet room where you ask God, "What if the way things are is not the way things have to be?" It starts when you, like Joanna, realize that the most radical thing you can do is invest your resources in a community that looks nothing like empire — and everything like the Kingdom. Today, ask the Father where your Galilee road begins.