This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
On Saturday, June 14, Susan and I went to Oxford, Michigan, so that I could participate in a Tough
Mudder held in that town. We had a blast. The weather was gorgeous and the course was set in a
stone quarry, and it was completely awesome.
One our way home, we were just north of Detroit when we pulled off the highway to get some lunch.
We took an exit following an IHOP sign. Once we got off the highway, there was a group of about 25-
30 people who were waving signs and yelling and I recognized it as a part of the No Kings rally being
held across the nation that day. The group was small and they were yelling and chanting something I
could not understand from inside my car. With that few people they seemed harmless.
However, in the time it took Susan and I to polish off some pancakes and eggs, the group grew to a
couple of hundred people and lined both sides of the road for several blocks. People were standing in
the road. They were waving upside down American flags under the Ukraine flag. They had a huge
paper mache head of Donald Trump they were trying to put on a pole to burn. They were holding
signs with every anti-American slogan I’ve ever heard.
Look, have whatever politics you want, I think it would be unhealthy for all of us to agree on everything
anyway. But what I want to address here is the blatant hatred of our country that came across loud
and clear from this crowd. The whole rally itself doesn’t make a lot of sense. Does allowing anti-king
rallies across the nation sound like something an authoritarian king would do? Many of the people we
saw were blocking traffic and making a nuisance of themselves and no one was stopping them. They
were screaming and yelling at cars going by. I got stopped by 3 stoplights between IHOP and
Interstate 75 and they were waving signs and yelling at us at each one and it was a weird feeling. To
me, it was like going to the zoo but Susan was asking me to make sure the doors were locked.
I wonder if all of these people who were out declaring the United States does not have a king are
affiliated with the Democratic party. Remind me again, how many primaries did the last Democrat
candidate for the presidency win? I’ll answer this one for you: she won zero primaries because Joe
Biden spontaneously developed cognitive decline after, according to the mainstream media, showing
absolutely no signs of it prior to the one presidential debate where he imploded.
We can argue politics all day long. It is really an American pastime to argue politics, but what I saw in
that crowd that day was not the desire to enter into conversation where we both laugh at the end and
go have dinner together. I long for the days when we could disagree, fight like cats and dogs, and
then say the pledge of allegiance together and sincerely mean the line where we declared we were
“one nation under God, indivisible…”
It crushes my heart that I can’t say for sure that we all embrace that line anymore. Given the number
of anonymous letters I get, many of you disagree with me on politics. Does that mean we can’t be
friends? Does that mean you want to avoid me at all costs? Because even though I don’t know who
the writers of these letters are, I don’t feel that way towards you. That crowd that I saw, I would not
join a crowd like that even if I agreed with them because all they wanted to do was shut down
conversation and force compliance. Just like everyone else, I always think I am right, but there are
plenty of good people who disagree with me and I would be the first one to call them good.
These incredible divides we have in our society have to be closed. What I want everyone to
understand is that we can close these divides without a single person changing their mind on a single
issue. What we all need to do is make being fellow Americans more important than how you put
those freedoms that come with that identification into practice. If you want to have a conversation
about how we can save the world with politics, great, let’s have the conversation. But at the end of
the conversation, I will gladly allow you the freedom to be wrong if you will extend to me the same
courtesy.