As this election season comes to a close, I am thankful for the extra time I will have when the winners is declared. Between, emails, texts, television ads and social media, it has been impossible to escape the barrage of truths, half-truths, and no-truths to which we have been subjected. Hopefully we can get back to a civil running of the country and focus on more important things, like ME.
Yes, like ME. What I have learned over many election cycles is that running for office is a dirty game where the “best man or woman” doesn’t always win. It’s a game I’ve never wanted to play and a sandbox where I never wanted to dig. However, as a citizen, my role has always been to speak up for injustice and oppression and to try to influence policy for the greater good.
But I’ve also come to realize that everyone in my “community” doesn’t agree on the best way to tackle the problems that plague us: obesity, neonatal birthweights, opioid deaths, sex trafficking, and sky-rocketing suicides (among others). And, oh yea, there is our modern-day plague: the pandemic.
Starting Wednesday, it will be about “me” and an introspective time of asking myself how I can make a difference in my own world. It’s not about putting out false information on Facebook, or twisting facts for a “greater end game”, it really is about me caring about my own community: the people that I live with, work with, and worship with, in my own world.
I’ve realized that I care about immigration and not just “band-aids” but fixing it permanently. I also care about food insecurity. I thought it was a third-world problem but it isn’t. It is a concern in our own backyard. And I care about healthcare. When I graduated from school in the late ‘70’s, I thought I could “fix” healthcare. I’m thankful I’m on Medicare, but my recent experiences teach me that healthcare is still “broken”: fragmented, expensive and inefficient.
So—it won’t be about “us” versus “them”, it will be about “me”. What is my role to make the world look more like God’s kingdom than mine? And how can I start living into that responsibility, starting Wednesday?
Blessings, my friend,
Agatha