My Vote is not to Vote

It may seem like this election year will never end. The politics of this election year are burning up the air waves of the media. In the end though it comes down to who am I going to vote for, that is the real reason that millions of dollars are thrown around on ads and TV spots. I am an unaffiliated voter. An independent voter who could swing the vote one way or the other. Of course my personal vote may not actually count that much but as a group independent voters are what it is all about.
So who is going to get my vote? Well let's not go through all the good and bad points of each candidate. I am planning not to vote for anyone at all. Now, don't get upset and start in with "If you don't vote don't complain." I will be voting for all my local and statewide races. I would never neglect the chance to have a direct impact on my city, county, and state representatives. But what have any of my national leaders done? Did they fix health care? No. Did they find a way to fight the war in Iraq better? Not really, they seem to be more interested in who voted for the war. The economy and gas prices seem to be out of the national governments control also. All the current candidates have there own take on all these issues. But none of them seem to have the back bone leadership that would change the world. All the plans they come up with are veiled in bald sound bits the make great news material. But will drop dead as soon as one of them is elected to the nations highest office.
As a Christian, there are many moral reasons that I cannot vote for any of the candidates. One candidate is so smooth and polished that some call him the anti-christ. They say that he was raised Muslim but now has converted to Christianity. One way or another he has beliefs that are not in line with my Christian values. Either he believes in the Muslim faith which I would not accept or he uses faith as a part of his slick GQ facade to be more appealing. Another candidate could have captured my vote if she could have won enough to get the nomination. I fear though that in the end her rivalry in this election has turned me away. The last candidate is war hero and a man I respect but not as a president. He has done great things with his time in the legislature. But his party has ruined the country in ways that will be hard pressed to repair. The selfishness and greed of this party toward our nation makes me wish that I never would have voted for them in the past. It also makes me humbled by the fact that I was so swept up in the fervor of the parties rhetoric that I did not stop to consider the consequences.
The end of it is this. This world is not our own God tells us that. We (as Christians) are aliens in this world. I feel that we got swept up in the politics of the world trying to make a difference. We need to stop and make a difference to those around us not to the world. We cannot make heaven appear on earth by forcing it into our petty idea of Christian. We will not save the world that way. We save the world by living in it as aliens making a difference to the family on the block being different in ways that make others want to have what we have. So, make a difference in your community but leave the nations to the world.

This war is over!!

I recently watched a Frontline special on a platoon of American soldiers. It was video shot by the members of the platoon. I was not sure that I knew what to expect since so many different people have tried to put their own take on the war. It seemed that as I watched the videos of the soldiers I got more and more angry at our government and more specifically the president. I have to admit that I was one of those swept up in the patriotic zealotism at the beginning of the war. And yes, I am one of those now out raged by the fact that the reasons we were told about going to war were false. The fact is that we need to fix what we broke. What does become clear until you see it from the stand point of a soldier on the ground in Iraq is the enormity of the mess we have created.

I sympathized with the soldier. They have a long hard job that means putting themselves at risk for a populist who don't (on the whole) appreciate the things that are being done. A soldiers job is to kill and destroy. These soldiers are having to police, rebuild, and be the moral agents for a country. Over and over again in the special the soldiers said it is harder now than when they were fighting to win control of the country. It is understandable that they feel tried and forgotten when our government sends them to a country then doesn't seem to know what it is doing once our soldiers get there. We have built one of the greatest armies in the world. The only problem is that we don't seem to know what to do with it. We are not at war anymore we are at reconciliation with wrong that we must right. In our arrogance we thought that we had a noble cause to invade a country, but now we need to pull out the killers and bring in people to heal this nation we broke.

The Church Pt.3

"Hey wake up!" Tino was shaking me into wakefulness the next second. I opened my eyes to see Tino's eyes not more than inches away. "Wake up!" Tino continued shaking me not content with letting me wake up more steadily. I looked over to see that the girls were gone. I was wider awake then. Tino seeing me awake moved away from me to the window moonlight was fallen in given everything a blue hue. He seemed nervous and bobbed about looking to me like he were doing his best bird routine he could muster. I took a look around the room. It was the same room that I had fallen asleep in. Just like the penny that you find on the street corner dirty and greenish from years of circulation is the same as the newer penny tucked away in your pocket. It felt like I was going blind or having a really hard time focusing on my surrounding. It was the same room but older. Dirty and abandoned the room looked as if no one had been in it in more than seventy-five years. The shelves that I could have sworn held nicknacks and odd bites of the old couples life were empty or fallen down. The kitchen was empty the odd cabinet door had swung wide looking to me like empty eye sockets on a skull.