08/24/2026
This morning I took Chris up to the Home Depot at exit 124 to meet up with a roofing crew for a few days work.
At Home Depot I saw something that broke my heart and stirred my spirit at the same time.
A group of men—perhaps ten or fifteen—stood waiting in the parking lot, hoping someone would offer them a day’s work. Two women were moving among them with snacks, water, and Gatorade. They told me no one was paying them to do it; they were simply “helping.” When I took a photograph, one of them approached me, concerned that I might be connected to immigration enforcement.
I looked at those men and felt the compassion Christ commands. Every human being is made in the image of God. Hunger is real. The desire to provide for one’s family is real. Scripture is unambiguous: we are to love the stranger, care for the vulnerable, and refuse to harden our hearts. A pastor’s heart cannot look away from suffering.
And yet compassion that refuses to tell the truth is not Christ-like; it is sentimental. These men were soliciting work in open defiance of the law. The women were knowingly facilitating an illegal labor market. That is not charity. It is participation in lawlessness. Scripture also teaches that civil authority is established by God for the restraint of evil and the protection of the common good (Romans 13). A nation that will not enforce its own borders eventually ceases to be a coherent nation at all.
What troubles me most is not the individual act of kindness, but the larger pattern it serves. For years we have watched a deliberate policy of mass illegal entry, paired with systematic non-enforcement, sanctuary practices, and the quiet normalization of illegal labor. The stated motives are humanitarian. The observable effects are the dilution of the rule of law, the undercutting of legal workers, the strain on public resources, and the steady transformation of the electorate in ways that advantage one political coalition. When borders are treated as optional, when citizenship is decoupled from shared language, history, and constitutional loyalty, the result is not a more just society—it is a more fragmented one.
Globalist ideologies that celebrate the erasure of borders and the weakening of national sovereignty are not neutral. They treat the nation-state—the only political form that has ever successfully protected ordered liberty for ordinary people—as an obstacle to be overcome. A people that loses the will to define and defend its own membership loses the capacity for self-government. The Constitution is not a su***de pact. Mercy without justice becomes an instrument of its own opposite.
I will continue to preach the Gospel to every person God places in my path, regardless of papers. I will feed the hungry and pray for the sojourner. But I will not pretend that open defiance of immigration law is Christian discipleship, nor that the political project of demographic transformation by illegal means is an expression of love. Truth and love are not enemies. The One who is both Truth and Love never asked us to choose between them.
Lord, give us hearts that are both tender and clear. Amen.
