Beauty From Ashes- 2012 Elections

Wow.  I have not written anything in awhile.

Then again, I guess today would be as good as any other day to be writing again.  We all know what happened last night.  Whether you're American, or from a different country, you must have heard the news.

The presidential elections are over.  Barack Obama is still the president.

When my friends and I heard the news last night, we were actually just coming back from a GOP party in Colorado, where we had been campaigning for Romney since Friday.

Hours had been invested calling voters.  We ran throughout thousands of random neighborhoods, trying to get the word out to vote in this critical swing state.  We spent time doing something because we believed that 200+ teenagers who believed in a cause could drastically change the direction our country was going.  We believed that even though we were under-aged, we could still make a difference.  We could still affect the world that we would inherit in the coming years.

But guess what happened.  You saw from the sentence up above.  Barack Obama is still president.  Our work was in vain.  And honestly, the next four years will be a daunting, scary mess.

Obamacare is still in place.  I don't know about you, but I've read enough of it to be quite wary of it.  At the same time, I will admit I do tend to take the conservative point of view, leading me to vehemently disagree with a number of his policy-decisions.  The United States has slowly been slipping down a hill in many different spheres of life.  If the models I've been seeing play out, life as we know it will slip right through our fingers.  And most of us won't realize that till it's gone.

When the news reached my friends and I, there was a moment of silence.  Ohio went blue.  And there went the elections.  Obama had reached the needed 270 electoral votes.  One of my friends wondered if our future, or at least the one that we each dreamed of, was now gone...

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." ~Ronald Reagan

From our dismayed faces and responses to the news, I would dare say that we felt like our freedom just evaporated.

But in the ashes, something can still rise.  Beauty from ashes.  Gladness from mourning.  Praises dispelling all despair...  What would rise from this?

Out of the silence in the van came prayers instead.  We don't know what God is doing.  We don't know why He allowed Obama to stay in office.  But then again, we can't see everything, only the puzzle piece.  He sees the full picture, though.  And who is better to hold our fate, our unknown future, than a known God?

I'd like to quote Governor Romney on this one, "I believe in America."  But really, America is just a nation; it will fall some day.  Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall.  The Sovereign Lord directs them all....

I love America, but I don't have to believe in it.  It isn't exactly stable.  But there is One who is, One who sees the full picture, the road behind the bend.  So guess what?

I believe in God.