Tara Palmieri

And all throughout the biblical narrative talks about, hey, be aware, be alert.

There are lots of people coming like this.

So be on your guard.

Hate will often disguise itself as love.

War will often disguise itself as just.

Yeah, yeah.

So I stepped in as lead pastor of Vinings Lake Church, which is right on the Mableton Smyrna line, 2015.

So it was right before the first administration of Trump.

And about six months in, I began to get pretty serious because Trump was kind of coming on the scene pretty strong during that time frame.

And very early on, I began to just see what was transpiring.

And so we began to be very explicit about calling out what we were seeing.

And over the course of a year or so, particularly his first term,

there was an exodus that happened and we didn't back away, just kept talking about the current issues that were happening.

I mean, at the time there were so many mass shootings.

We brought in a blacksmith for one of our Sunday gatherings.

And then we got from the local sheriff's department, we got a couple of weapons that were used and we had a blacksmith stand outside our Sunday gathering and melt down these guns into garden tools because we have a

like a community garden back behind our church.

And we thought, oh, what if we took these instruments that were taking life and we use them to actually give life?

So we were doing like that's called symbolic action.

The prophets do it all the time.