It has been a long election cycle. I can hardly remember a time when political ads did not take up the majority of a commercial break.
The votes have been cast. Late last night the election was decided in favor of President Obama.
Today half the country celebrates while half the country decides where they will be rhetorically moving to for the next four years. Facebook is exploding with elated and disgruntled people alike.
Andrew Gardner
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News networks are already beginning to think about the 2016 election and the possible candidates. Disgruntled voters now plot strategies and begin to envision the perfect candidate for the 2016 election. Those more pleased with the outcome can take a couple years off because they have accomplished their goal.
But really, do we have reason to be disgruntled or joyful? While the rhetoric and grandeur of this election cycle seem to suggest this election has cosmic significance, does it?
Shane Claiborne wrote a piece for the website RedLetterChristians on Monday, and his concluding paragraph struck me. He writes:
So, we may vote on November 6. But we will also vote today, and tomorrow, and the next day. We are convinced that change is not confined to one day every four years. Change happens every day. We vote with our lives. And we are convinced that voting for a new President may be little more than damage control. For Presidents and Caesars do not save the world. But there is a God who can.
I might even go so far as to say there is a God who has. I hope that in the coming days, we remember our hope for America and the world does not rest in a Republican governor from Massachusetts or a Democratic incumbent president. Our hope rests in a poor, Palestinian Jew that hung and died on a cross over 2,000 years ago.
I hope that we remember that neither “donkey” nor “elephant” will ring out from a great number of angels, but lamb.
For “worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
So let us remember to vote today as well as the next in action and thought.
Andrew Gardner (abgardner@email.wm.edu) of Yorktown, Va., is a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary and a student at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity.