Call Me a Sap

Call me a sap, but I have to admit that on this morning’s drive from the polling place to grab a free cup of coffee at Starbucks, I got teary. Who would have thought that the simple act of voting could result in a free cup of joe?

Okay, so some of the tears were coffee anticipation, but most of the rest had to do with the act of voting. I’ve done it many times before, of course, but something about this time got to me.

I reflected on the conversations I've had with family, friends, and coworkers over the last six years – uh, I mean, year and a half – of this historic presidential campaign. Some people, including me, are actually pinning hopes on the outcome of this thing. Waiting in line for hours has heretofore been reserved for rock concert tickets or those wild day-after-Thanksgiving electronics sales. When people are willing to spend two, three, five hours waiting in line to vote, something is up. Perhaps they believe that change really is possible.

I thought about folks in Chile and Indonesia whom I count among my friends thanks to church-to-church relationships. When I visited Chile in early November 2002, four years ago next week, the first question asked by people I met, even those I was meeting for the first time, was, “Who did you vote for?” Church leaders in Indonesia pay close attention to how we talk about Muslims and the ways in which our nation relates to nations like theirs. Our sisters and brothers around the globe care deeply about what happens in our elections. Their daily lives will be changed by the results of our vote.

I rehearsed the promise and poop of the seemingly endless campaign process we endured to get here: The accusations, the mudslinging, the half-truths told about others, the cavalier crimping of truth in service to self-interest…and the hope, the vision of a world (local and global) in peace, hands joined to address poverty, feed children, care for the earth and for one another. In the midst of it all, the stark truth stands that by tomorrow morning, however this election turns out, standing on the shoulders of so many who gave so much before us, together and despite ourselves we will have whacked cracks in all sorts of ceilings, glass and otherwise.

And I thought about what lies ahead. I was teary-eyed, not starry-eyed. There is still so much work to do and so much to overcome. As the hobbit Frodo (and others before him) sang, “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.” Some other theologian somewhere some time said something about the call to rise from our knees to become the answer to our prayers. The mist in my eyes between the polling place and the Starbucks this morning also twinkled with the realization that the vote I cast today wasn’t the end of the campaign after all. The work is just beginning and the question is, “For the sake of the world in which I live, how am I going to be what I voted?”