Marriage counseling with Adam Hamilton

As a recent transplant, I feel a personal involvement with the election runups in three separate states: Pennsylvania, because I live here now; and Missouri and Kansas, because up until last year I lived three blocks from the state line separating those two.

In Philadelphia, the scene is comparatively sedate. Politics here are almost ridiculously progressive. Any drama ended with the August primary, when a candidate who identifies as a democratic socialist defeated two more traditional dems in an open seat for U.S. Congress.

There is action in Congressional districts outside of the city, where at least two Democratic candidates have a good shot at knocking off Republicans. My husband, an inveterate canvasser, spends weekends knocking doors for these races. I figure my improbable day job running a program for unhoused people fulfills my good-citizen obligation for the moment, so I stay home and decompress.

I follow the news from Missouri with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. Friends there spend nearly every waking moment working to elect Democrats and finally wipe out the Republican supermajority in the state legislature. Bless you all. But I worry that no amount of door knocking will be enough to stop the great deceit of Amendment 3, a ballot issue that purports to be about ending medical care for trans kids but is actually intended to once again make nearly all abortions illegal in the state. That's Missouri after years of Republican rule – corrupt, repressive and toxic. Forty-plus years there have turned me into a pessimist, but I'm hoping for the best on Tuesday.

And then there is Kansas, where Adam Hamilton is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate.

Lots of people in the Kansas City area have stories about this guy. He does, after all, pastor a church that has grown to around 25,000 members. My story goes way back, before the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection existed. To when a young Adam Hamilton was the associate pastor at Central United Methodist Church in Kansas City.

Jon and I were engaged. We lived in Kansas City but the wedding would take place in Pennsylvania, officiated by the minister of the Episcopal church that my family had attended for generations.

Father Penny was old school. He insisted that Jon and I receive three hours of premarital counseling before he would do the honors. There was no Zoom back then; he told us to find a pastor in Kansas City.

I was a member of Central UMC, so I asked at the office if someone could help. "That would be Pastor Hamilton," the church secretary said.

Fine by me. Pastor Hamilton was the nerdy, energetic young pastor who in just a few months at church had become a hit with the congregation.

We sat down for our first of three sessions and exchanged pleasantries. I was 33 at the time. Jon is eight years older than me. Pastor Hamilton was 24.

He sat back and eyed us. He said: "I really don't know what to say to you guys."

So there you have it. There was, at least fleetingly, a time when Adam Hamilton was at a loss for words.

As it turned out, we found plenty to talk about. Adam – as he was known – wondered why Jon didn't join me at church. Jon explained he is Jewish. This intrigued Hamilton. He had lots of questions about what we thought an interfaith marriage would look like. He wasn't skeptical or judgmental, just genuinely interested.

Now, as a high-profile candidate, Hamilton is being assailed by his opponent, Roger Marshall, and Republican allies like Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for maintaining in his ministry that Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths are as favored as Christians in the eyes of God. These disciples of the Christian Nationalist movement call such a notion "heresy." In fact, it is very much in keeping with the teachings of a barefoot Jew who wandered through the Holy Land telling people to disregard the labels and castes and love one another. Hamilton has made tolerance a central tenet of his ministry. I am here to tell you that he comes by it genuinely.

Jon and I met with Pastor Hamilton for an hour on three consecutive Monday evenings. It was great fun. We talked about sports and stuff going on around town. I think he dispensed some advice about marriage. He had personal experience, having married his high school sweetheart, LaVon, when he was 17 and she was 18. She is now beside him on the campaign trail.

His only tip I specifically remember was a suggestion that sometimes we might want to record our conversations, and play them back to see how we were speaking to one another. We never followed through on that one.

Jon and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary this year. Pastor Hamilton went on to grow a mega church, become an international faith leader and, now, become the "Cinderella story" of the 2026 election cycle, as I heard one pundit put it.

His political success is not really so surprising. Hamilton has spent decades talking to people from all walks of life, on all points of the political spectrum, at their best moments and their worst.

His superpower is connecting with people. Jon and I got an early taste of it, though we had no way of knowing how far Adam Hamilton would take that gift. We just thought we were having fun at pre-marital counseling.

(Choice Words is my new place to tell stories that I think might be relevant in the grand scheme of what's going on in our crazy world. If you've read this far, I would love to have you subscribe and comment.)