A word to the team, the churches, and every Minnesotan who walked the last eighteen months with us
By Phillip C. Parrish
September 10, 2026 · Kenyon, Minnesota
I woke this morning with an old picture in my head. Love is like trying to hold water in your hands.
Cup your palms and it rests there. Squeeze, and it runs through your fingers. Panic and clutch, and you end up with wet sleeves and an empty hand. The water was never yours to own. It was given to you to hold carefully, to drink from, to share, and to keep receiving.
I first thought of that image while praying for one of my sons. Then I thought of you.
For eighteen months we have been on the road — farm halls, church basements, capitol steps, kitchen tables, county fairs, late-night calls, and the long quiet drives between them. Some of you carried the work when the money was thin and the knives were out. Some of you prayed when the rooms were empty. Some of you told the truth when it would have been easier to stay polite. Some of you just kept showing up for your parish, your kids, your neighbors, and a state that is being looted in daylight.
This is for you. Not a victory lap. A reminder. Love and lead. Do both. Drop either one and the other turns into a counterfeit.
The measure of love
Scripture does not describe love as a mood you catch and lock in a jar. St. Paul wrote it so plainly a man can measure himself against it when his pride is loud and his patience is gone:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:4–8
Notice what is missing from that list. Possession. Control. Scorekeeping. The demand that people complete you, applaud you, or stay useful to the cause. Those things feel like love when a movement is young and hungry. They are not love. They are fear wearing love’s coat.
Christians have a hard word for the real thing: charity. Not the soft modern meaning. Charity means to will the good of the other for the other’s sake — not for what it returns to you. St. Thomas Aquinas said it that way. St. John put it sharper: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The source is not the crowd. The source is not the campaign. The source is God. If you try to drink only from people, you will drain them. If you try to be their source, you will drown them and then resent them for sinking.
Water. Hands. The gap.
Living water is never owned. It is received and given. Christ to the woman at the well: the water He gives becomes a spring, not a cistern (John 4:14). From His side on the Cross come blood and water (John 19:34). Squeeze the gift and you are trying to be the source. Let some of it fall and you are telling the truth about grace.
Scripture treats the hand as an office. Moses’ hands held up mean the people stand; when they drop, the people fall (Exodus 17:11–12). Christ’s hands are opened, not clenched. Peter reaches from the water and is caught (Matthew 14:31). Proverbs 24 is a hand that holds back the one stumbling toward slaughter — not a hand that points at him from a safe window.
Two hands. Two offices. The cupped hand is 1 Corinthians 13 — patience, kindness, no ledger. The reaching hand is Proverbs 24:11–12 — rescue, no “we did not know.” Drop either hand and you get a counterfeit. Sentiment with no rescue. Rescue with no charity. Minnesota has both in stock.
The other hand
Love without leadership turns into sentiment. Leadership without love turns into a machine. Minnesota has seen both. Soft churches that would rather be liked than holy. Hard operators who would rather win a room than save a soul. Neither one will rebuild a constitutional republic. Neither one will protect a child.
That is why the other Scripture that would not leave me this morning is not a love poem. It is a summons.
“Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?”
— Proverbs 24:11–12
There it is. You do not get to cup the water in private and then shrug when your neighbor is being marched toward the edge. “We did not know” is the oldest lie in politics and the oldest lie in the pew. The One who weighs the heart already knows what you saw. He knows what you filed away because it was inconvenient. He knows which fraud you named and which fraud you decided was above your pay grade.
So the balance is this: hold people the way you hold water — gently, without clutching — and still put your body in the gap when they are being taken. Kindness is not silence. Patience is not permission. Love that never protects is not the love Paul described. Love that keeps a record of every slight is not that love either.
To the team
You already know what it cost. Long miles. Thin budgets. Slander dressed up as reporting. Friends who vanished when the pressure rose. I have watched you choose the better path more times than you think I noticed. You built instead of tearing down. You told the truth when a softer sentence would have kept a donor warm. That is not small.
Do not squeeze the people beside you now that the season has been hard. Do not keep a private ledger of who failed you. Do not boast in what you carried. Love that needs an audience is already leaking. Protect one another’s names when they are not in the room. Endure the ordinary days — the unglamorous ones — because endurance is where a movement becomes a people.
And when the water slips, because it will, do not pretend you can clutch harder and make it stay. Open your hands. Confess quickly. Ask pardon where you owe it. Ask God where you owe that. Then cup your hands and receive again.
To the churches, the families, the towns
Minnesota is not an abstraction. It is a parish hall after Mass. It is a dairy barn before dawn. It is a mother at a school board meeting who is done being told she is the problem. It is a veteran who still believes the oath meant something. It is a kid trying to figure out how to love a girl without turning her into a possession or a project.
The vision worth bleeding for is simple enough for a kitchen table: families who can raise children in the faith without being taxed, catechized, or trafficked by the state; towns that produce instead of being farmed by nonprofits; courts that weigh facts instead of factions; a republic that still knows the difference between liberty and loot.
That vision dies in two ways. First, when we clutch our own — our brand, our faction, our hurt — so tight that no living water remains. Second, when we see the slaughter and say we did not know.
Rescue is not a metaphor in this state. Children have been used. Budgets have been stripped. Elections have been treated like a private industry. Foreign networks have been allowed to treat Minnesota as a harvest field. You have seen it. I have seen it. The Lord who keeps watch over your soul has seen it. Proverbs 24 does not leave us a third option.
Open hands. Steady feet.
Our Lord did not love us by clutching. He opened His hands on the Cross. That is the pattern. A Christian people does not get a different definition of love because the politics got ugly. The same charity that has to carry a marriage, a parish, a farm, a sick parent, and a funeral is the charity that has to carry a state.
Hold the water gently. Keep your eyes on the One who puts it in your hands. And when they start marching the vulnerable toward the edge, do not look at your shoes and call it prudence.
Love them. Lead them. Rescue those being taken. That is the whole work.
Phillip C. Parrish
Producer and host, Freedom Talk with Phil
Phillip C. Parrish Intelligence Cell / Operation Shadow Hunt
“Above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” — Colossians 3:14
For comment or to get involved
Phillip C. Parrish — phillip@parrish4mn.com
Heidi Wanty — heidi@parrish4mn.com
(612) 460-1717
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