I drive people to their research appointments for a living. People who’ve never met me, climbing into Gibson’s Nissan Versa, trusting me to get them where they’re going without turning the ride into something about me. You learn the job fast: show up, pay attention, and get out of the way. The moment you start narrating the trip instead of driving it, you’ve stopped serving the person sitting next to you.

That’s the whole discipline of storytelling too. And it’s where Pastor Shawn Wasson’s discipline holds or slips, depending on where he points it.

When he turns that discipline on himself, his own education, his own denomination’s reckoning with abuse, he shows up. He pays attention to what the story is actually saying instead of what he wants it to say. He gets out of the way long enough to let it land on him. That’s the harder version of the craft, and he pulls it off. Letting the material work on the writer before the writer works on the reader: that’s the whole job.

But watch what happens when he turns the same discipline on Representative Talarico. He stops driving and starts narrating. Talarico isn’t just wrong, he’s “tricking” people. His politics aren’t just different, they’re Marxism. And Marxism isn’t a disagreement anymore, it’s a road that ends in forced labor and killing. That’s not showing up to the story. That’s writing the ending before the story’s earned it.

Here’s the thing I’d flag in any manuscript, sacred or not: you don’t get to skip the connective tissue and call the leap conviction. Whatever Jesus clearing the temple means, and however we apply it, it doesn’t by itself hand anybody a finished political argument. The distance between what happened and what it proves has to be walked, one honest sentence at a time. Good writing walks that distance. Skipping it isn’t faith. It’s just impatience wearing faith’s clothes.

And the same standard has to hold for Talarico, because craft doesn’t care which side you’re standing on. Show up to the passage. Pay attention to what it actually says. Get out of the way of what you wish it said.