In November 2016, the puddle-jumper airplane touched down at the Central Nebraska Regional Airport in the booming metropolis of Grand Island. If you’ve never heard of Grand Island, don’t worry, neither had I until I booked the ticket. I got off the plane and set foot in Nebraska for the first time in my life. Members of the pastoral nominating committee of First Presbyterian Church of Hastings picked me up and drove me 45 minutes through cornfields to the city of Hastings, population 25,000, where I would interview to become their senior pastor. Not only was this a new state and a new cultural context for me, I was also a bit naïve and wet behind the ears, this would be my first time serving in a senior pastor role.

Something else happened in November 2016. There was an election and the country was divided into red and blue states, like an awkward jigsaw puzzle. The state of Nebraska was crimson red, but I was told that the church was diverse theologically and politically, so the red and the blue came together in the church to make an interesting shade of purple.

My interview went well and the church extended a call to me. Our family moved to Hastings in March of 2017 to begin a new adventure in Nebraska as our country became further and further polarized.

Being a pastor in the age of social media, I started to receive lots of friend requests from my new church members. I would accept those requests and then spend a little bit of time scanning their profiles to learn about them. Some of them posted photos of their families, scripture verses, and cute cat videos while others seemed to be more politically active, at least in their social media posts.

Two of those social media profiles stuck out to me. One had a profile picture wearing a hand-knitted pink hat while she participated in the Women’s March protesting some of the policies that were being passed in the new administration. The other had a profile picture in the ubiquitous red hat with the white writing and an American flag. I learned that both of these women grew up in the church and were classmates in high school. Now they were both in their 50s and had extremely divergent political views. When I read some of their social media posts, I saw them both supporting the partisan causes they cared about, defending their positions, and questioning the positions of others, sometimes passionately.

I observed these two for a few months as they sometimes engaged in animated exchanges with each other. About six months after I arrived in Hastings, I received an email from one of them, asking to schedule a meeting with both of them to “discuss an issue.” There was no other context to the email, so I was pretty sure that I would be mediating a conflict between two church members, a task I did not feel particularly well-equipped to do.

The day of our meeting arrived and I was nervous. My palms were sweating and I had knots in my stomach. I kept thinking about the best way to manage this meeting, should I have them sit across from each other or next to each other at the table in my office. The hour came and they both arrived and walked in, but rather than spitting venom at each other, they were both smiling and laughing, like a reunion of good friends.

They sat down and showed me an article from our local newspaper that they had both read about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on the border of Nebraska and South Dakota. The girls in the schools there did not have sufficient access to feminine hygiene products, so they would miss a few days of school every month.

These two church members had both read the same article and posted about it on social media. They saw each other’s posts and decided that they should rally the church to do something about it. What I thought was going to be a mediated conflict between two church members turned into a generative brainstorming session of how to set up a supply drive to ensure that the high school on the Pine Ridge reservation had supplies of feminine hygiene products. The only conflict arose when they asked me to announce this from the pulpit and refer to the supply drive as “tampon Tuesdays.” I declined to go with that slogan for the supply drive campaign, but agreed to move forward with the project.

What happened next was incredible. Our church collected enough supplies to fill a moving van, along with thousands of dollars of donations. These two church members stood together in front of the church encouraging and inspiring us to support young women in a tangible way.

In a world so often divided into neat and irreconcilable categories, serving a purple church is a messy, beautiful gift. It’s standing in the tension, watching the red and the blue bleed into each other in ways that defy the partisan narratives. It’s witnessing moments like this supply drive, where people who seem like opposites on the surface come together over what matters most: compassion, justice, sharing the love of Christ in tangible ways.

Sure, it’s not easy. There are days when the tension feels unbearable, when social media wars spill into the pews, and the preacher’s tightrope walk gets a little wobbly. But then there are moments like that meeting in my office—two people laughing and planning to make the world better, even if they still disagree on so much else. Those moments remind me that this messy, purple calling isn’t about solving every problem or healing every division. It’s about making room for grace in the middle of it all and discovering, again and again, that the lines dividing us aren’t nearly as strong as the spirit that binds us together.