Tag Archives: clinton

If Your Candidate Loses on Tuesday…

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The end is near. Barring an electoral college rarity, on Tuesday there will be a new person elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Some will be elated. Some will be despondent. Some aren’t going to be happy if either front runner wins.

In fact, no matter who comes out ahead there will be a large portion of this country who will be disappointed, scared, or even angry. Up to half of those who vote (and technically even a little over half) will later find out their nominee was rejected by the nation.

Losing is not fun. Not in a foot race, not in Monopoly, and certainly not in something as important as a general election. It stings, it hurts. Some of the issues we are facing are quite contentious. Some of the decisions that will be made by the next president may impact us negatively. Losing carries not just pain, but a lot of potential anxiety as well.

So, what do we do if our candidate loses? I’m glad you asked. I have three suggestions.

We can start with acting like level-headed adults.

Sometimes my children don’t get what they want. Sometimes when they don’t get what they want they cross their arms and push out their bottom lip. They acquire a high-pitched moan in their voice. They pout.

But all the foot stomping and whining doesn’t change the fact that in our house we don’t eat Kit-Kats for breakfast (at least when the children are present). Pouting changes little to nothing, sometimes even making the situation worse. Fortunately, children are cute so we can usually smile at their little tantrums.

You and I are adults. And we aren’t all that cute. So if your preferred candidate isn’t elected, please don’t pout. Don’t whine. Don’t stomp your feet and declare “no one loves me.”

Maybe pouting isn’t your thing. Perhaps your response to losing is less like my children and more like George Brett. You charge the umpire, throw whatever you can grab, scream your head off, and must be restrained by multiple people.

Again, this response does not help anything. Reacting in anger may garner you some back slaps from like-minded people but it won’t make anyone change their mind on how they voted. It will just make you look like a sore loser and further convince people you’ve lost your mind.

Don’t lose influence or respect because you respond to losing like a child or lunatic. Take a breath. Count to 10. Bite your tongue. If you can’t do that, have a friend change your Facebook password for a week. Pick up yoga. Relax.

Which leads me to my next suggestion for the losing side: Take a step back.

Remember how talking heads told us Obama was the certain death of our nation? We survived. Some of us are better off, some of us are not, but we are still here.

We’ve survived Republicans and Democrats and we will again. Your preferred person not being elected is not the end of the world as we know it. (If this is the apocalypse I’ll buy you a shirt that says “Don’t blame me.”)

We need perspective. This is a four-year term. If we get it wrong, we can try again soon. People will be campaigning for 2020 by May.

We have these great checks and balances that help ensure electing a bad candidate won’t dissolve the republic. We can impeach, challenge, veto, block vetoes, and vote again in the years to come. We can go before courts to contest laws. We can elect a new Congress. We have a system strong enough to survive 44 flawed presidents thus far; I’m confident we can handle one more.

I understand you probably have some major concerns about what might happen if your candidate isn’t elected. I just want to remind you to take a step back and look at the whole picture.

Finally, let’s be good to each other.break-glass

This election has moved us further and further to the extremes. The venom and propaganda has reached a fever pitch. Let’s move away from that. Let’s move toward each other. Or at least let’s move forward together.

We won’t ever all agree, but we can do better. Imagine if we could disagree with each other with a modicum of respect and civility. Imagine if we didn’t call everyone who votes differently names. Imagine if we didn’t assume that the other side wants to ruin our lives. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not only one.

Let’s not assume the worst of the other half of the country. They are your neighbors, your friends, your fellow worshipers, your co-workers, your kids, maybe even your spouses. Are some of them misguided? Yep. Are some motivated by the wrong things? Probably. But let’s not put any more barriers between us. Let’s come together, lets share meals, lets learn from each other. Let’s be kind in our social media posts, let’s be careful with our words to the people we encounter, and let’s be considerate even in the way we think about the folks that disagree with us.

This is hard work. It doesn’t come naturally to many of us. Just because its difficult or unnatural doesn’t mean it’s not worth our time and effort. Just because everyone else around us has adopted hateful rhetoric or a doom and gloom outlook doesn’t mean we must do likewise.

After George W. Bush defeated Al Gore and the hanging chads had been recounted, I saw a shirt with his picture that read, “Not My President.” It bothered me then and it bothers me now. We have one country, diverse as she may be. Whoever wins will be the president of all of us: those who vote Trump or Clinton, those who vote Johnson and Stein and McMullin and Castle and even those who write in Jesus or Mickey Mouse.

We are in this together. You and I. Republicans and Democrats and Independents and the Amish. So if your side loses please act your age. Remember this is probably not the end of America and try to always be good to each other.

We might lose an election but maybe we can regain some decency. Maybe we can win at the stuff that matters the most. I think we can do it. I’m committed to try. I hope you’ll join me.

And if your candidate happens to win, please celebrate graciously. That is important too.

To My Non-Christian Friends This Election Season

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To My Non-Christian Friends, dearfriends_black

This election season has been something else, huh? (Here is a video of puppies if you need something to cheer you up.) Take heart, it is almost over. We have at least until February before people start openly campaigning for 2020.

In the meantime, I’d like to say something to you. Specifically, I’d like to say sorry. I think you have seen us Christians at our worst lately and for that I apologize.

I’m sorry that you’ve seen so much fighting between us. We can be brutal to each other and we call ourselves family. We fire missiles from all sides of the aisle and don’t worry too much about collateral damage. It probably isn’t very inviting when we behave this way. I’m sorry if you are less likely to want to be around us after all this.

I’m sorry that you’ve probably gotten into a debate or two with one of us. I’m sorry that we don’t often fight very graciously. I’m sorry that we stoop to things like name calling and rapid dismissal.

I regret that we often want to be heard, rather than hear. That isn’t very kind of us.

I’m sorry if you were unfriended because of your political views. I’m sorry we value our opinions more than your friendship. I’m sorry that we let partisanship get in the way of relationship. There are things we will all never agree on, but that shouldn’t stop us from sharing meals and photos of our kids and life in general.

I’m sorry that you see us defending things that are indefensible. Things Jesus would oppose. Things we have routinely and loudly condemned. I’m sorry that we hold a double standard so that we can excuse our candidates and condemn someone else’s. That’s not consistent and its certainly not Christlike.

I’m sorry for all the false memes and bunk articles we have posted. We don’t think very highly of lying, but we are at times in such a rush to be right we fail to check our information. That isn’t very good of us.

I’m sorry if we have led you to believe that a person’s eternal destiny hinges on how they vote. We don’t actually believe that, though we sometimes act and preach like it. Sometimes we (rightly or wrongly) put a lot of hope and energy into these things, but if you give us a time to catch our breath we will remember it is grace, not ballots, that save us.

We sing a song that says our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus. I’m sorry we haven’t acted that way lately. While we want to have a say in government, ultimately our hope is not in presidents and senators and legislation.

I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt by the way we talk about the candidates and their supporters. Regardless of politics you and they are loved and cherished by God. We’ve failed to reflect that too often. That grieves me.

I apologize that regardless of which side we are on, we are often unable to understand where you are coming from. I’m sorry if we talk down to you or figure you couldn’t possibly know or have hurt you with our assumptions.

I know it is probably hard to see through all the nonsense, but Jesus is better than we represent. I’m not sure of a lot of things, but I’m absolutely positive of that. I’m sorry if we have failed him and you this election season.

If we are honest we are just regular ole humans. We mess up, we don’t always do what we want. We can be too passionate, we can be misguided, we can be flat wrong. Please don’t hold that against Jesus.

I can’t speak for all of us, but I can speak for me. I would trade in all this election stuff if it meant people would be more likely to consider following Jesus. His ways are better. We have a saying that goes like this, “His grace is sufficient.” The grace of God is sufficient to cover our weakness and our mistakes. We greatly depend on that.

Now I’m asking for grace from you. Please forgive us for our actions and attitudes, our words and our compliance. Please forgive us for pointing you toward a political party more than Jesus. Please forgive us when we cross the line, wound others, or look no different than any other person you know.

We are supposed to do better than that. We have been wrong. Maybe not all of us, but some of us, including me. And I’m sorry.

Church, We Have No Dog In This Fight

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One of the worst aspects of an election is that it pits people against each other. We start noticing who is with us and who is against. We draw lines and form ranks. Its us versus them.

As we line up to choose sides the candidates lay out their battle plans. Pro-this and anti-that. We (hopefully) weigh the pros and cons and we chose our side.

We select our candidate. We stand united. We rally behind them. We argue as to why they are the most suited to hold office. We applaud their good nature. We justify their bad behavior. And we stand at the ready to defend and fight for their rightful place. This is our normal.

The question I have been wondering this election cycle is, why do we, the church, feel the need to pick a candidate? Why do we feel like we have to take a side? And perhaps most soul searching, why do we feel like we have to baptize our candidate of choice and line them up with our religious beliefs?

This is a concept foreign to many Christians in the world today and for most of church history. Things like democratic elections are still rare when you consider the breadth of human experience and existence. Yet here we are lining up, doing battle, anointing our candidates.

What if we decided we don’t have a dog in the fight? What if we said, you know what, these candidates are so flawed, so disingenuous, so other-kingdom focused, that we’re not even going to bother taking sides?

I believe this is what the early church would do. As the church was being born, first making its way across foreign lands, the Roman Empire held much of the known world and would soon experience great politic unrest. They didn’t hold elections and they didn’t care too much about what the church thought, but I think there is a lesson here for us.

If you would please allow me a moment for a brief history. Just a few decades after the death and resurrection of Christ, the Roman emperor Nero had become so unpopular that the empire turned against him. In response he took his own life, leaving a vacancy for the throne.

In the year that followed, four different men would hold the title Emperor of Rome. Galba would be the first and hold office for seven months. He withheld payment from his soldiers and they in turn killed him, backing the authority of a man named Otho. Otho would take the throne only to learn that yet another man was marching on Rome. This man, Vitellius, would conquer Otho’s forces and be recognized as the legitimate ruler of the empire. That is, until Vespasian arrived from the Middle East and dispatched Vitellius and his sympathizers, and took the throne for himself.

Talk about a crazy twelve months. It makes 2016 look fairly tame in comparison.

The reason I tell you this story is because I doubt the early church, our foremothers and fathers, put much stock in which emperor they supported. I’m guessing they didn’t pass out voter’s guides at the weekly gathering or put signs out in their yards. I am fairly certain they weren’t overly concerned with which one was going to raise or lower taxes and which one had a better economic policy or even which one was more pro-life.

I am positive they weren’t looking to see which candidate would more closely line up with their Christian values. They would have never tried to force one of them to fit their worldview in order to justify their support. I don’t imagine them saying, “Well if you don’t like Vespasian you must be pro-Galba.”

They likely would not have chosen a side. They had no dog in the fight. No horse in the race. Whoever sat in the Roman equivalent to the Oval Office made little difference to the church. I can hear them saying, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

The church didn’t pick sides because no matter who is emperor, Jesus is Lord. They didn’t pick sides because the options laid out before them were unsatisfactory. They didn’t pick sides because the laws the Romans passed had very little to do with how they were called to live. They didn’t pick sides because God already sat on the only throne that mattered.

There is the Kingdom of God and there is the empire of Rome. They are two different realities. The church firmly established that they were Kingdom people. “Strangers in the world,” one writer would say.

Kingdom people have too much to do to worry about who is going to be the next Caesar. In the Roman world when babies were abandoned to die, the church brought them in and built orphanages. In the Roman world when health was fleeting and disease was rampant, the church brought them in and built hospitals and administered healthcare. It was the church who brought in strangers and foreigners and took care of the poor and widows. It was the church who stood against a world full of racism and sexism and classism and slavery. And they did it without petitions or lobbyists or super pacs.

The early church didn’t look for the government to legislate morality or justifiably use tax money. They didn’t look to the government for tax breaks or religious liberty. They looked to Jesus and tried to live faithfully.

Galba. Otho. Vitellius. Vespasian. Why pick a side? We are pledged to Christ.

Church, I truly believe in this election (and probably most elections) we don’t have a dog in the fight. I don’t think it is worth choosing sides. We have the two least liked candidates in our nation’s history and we keep saying you can or can’t be a certain kind of person if you don’t pick the right one.

To be so emotionally invested in picking the next Caesar is a waste of energy. To put our hope in whichever one we think will protect our freedoms the most is dangerously shortsighted. Emperor-to-be Otho promised the world to his soldiers, they put him in power, and then he withheld everything he promised and was forced out three months later. Don’t sell yourself to the highest bidder.

You don’t have to do all the lining up behind your choice. You don’t have to become their champion. You don’t have to justify their every move or attempt to get their world and your world to line up perfectly. Spoiler alert: they don’t fit. You don’t have to compromise your fundamental beliefs in order to pick one of the people desperate for power.

If you objectively study the candidates (and not just the top two) and can vote for one, okay. It is also a completely Christian response to say I can’t choose between these people battling for the throne. It isn’t a waste, it isn’t a vote for the other side, it is a matter of principle.

We are Kingdom people first. Our fight is a different fight. Our Kingdom doesn’t require borders or laws or military or taxes or presidents or elections. We have already made our choice. Caesar can have the throne, the land, the money, the power. None of that matters. Caesars come and go. Presidents come and go. Nations come and go. But the Kingdom of God endures forever.

So don’t worry. Don’t fret. Don’t feel like you have to pick between the lesser of two evils. Pick Jesus. Live faithfully. Love people.

If you feel you must make a choice and just have to put out a yard sign or bumper sticker, go with one that says, “I’m with Jesus.”