Post-Election Thoughts

To all those who are disappointed or angered by the results of the presidential race, other elections, amendments, or propositions, I offer my genuine condolences. Today is a crappy day for a lot of people. If you are one of them, I hope you can trust in the long, slow, but inevitable evolution of the human race toward love, toward building the kingdom of God. We'll get there. If you feel powerless...if you feel hopeless...if you think that yesterday was a setback...remember that you cannot legislate love. No laws can force people to treat each other with compassion. That transformation happens only from within the human heart. Things don't change from the top down. Oh sure, that can help. But that change results first from how we live and love here on the ground.

In spite of powers that be, many of which try to sell us the idea of individualism (for which I am certain that people 200 years from now will look back and think we were absolutely crazy), remember the power that you have to transform the life of another by loving your neighbor. Remember that we are one. That we belong to one another. That we all want the same things...peace, happiness, justice, freedom, to know each other, to be known, to love, to be loved.  So as hard is it is sometimes, let's not demonize those with whom we disagree politically or in other ways.  We just have different ideas of how to create those things that we long for in our world and in our lives .

You and I will never all the way see it. Our vision of the kingdom of God will never be fully realized while we're on this planet. We'll never experience the full fruits of our labor. And what is more self-sacrificially loving than that? To live and die for a world that we will never fully enjoy...but that those who come long after us might. To be one small piece of a very large puzzle, one tiny link in a chain of love thousands of years in the making. Working to build a kingdom of God on Earth for people we will never know and who will never know our contribution to it. We'll get there. Together. With little acts of love each day that will never be broadcast on NBC News or Fox News. With no ticker tape or fanfare. Only with the hope of a deep faith that reminds us that we are not alone in this struggle that often feels so lonely, that this solitary journey has not been undertaken alone, that billions of people are striving to add their link in that chain of love as well.

We'll get there. Together. Not in our time. But in time. 

-Mark Z