Eric Youngblood: A Hidden Election Insight

  • Tuesday, October 18, 2016
  • Eric Youngblood

“The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.”

 

I’m wondering today if the veracity of this Wendell Berry-ian utterance might prove a warm shower for strained worry muscles that have been overworked of late.

 

Imaginations, where the most vigorous worry muscles are housed, especially among the sensitive, the experienced, or the most overly visual have a way of darting away from the yard of the present into the surrounding forest of a calamitous future like a hyper-kinetic beagle on a bathroom break in the yard.

Armed with 220 million scent receptors and an instinctual drive to follow his nose, the olfactorily-magnificent canine is out of sight faster than your Fitbit can register your bounding steps from the porch to supervise.

 

We, like that pesky dog, catch whiffs of so many luring scents of worry ourselves that the millions of self-preserving detectors in us are, without a vigorous counter-effort, susceptible to being carried away many more weeks and months in advance than we’ve ever been given or promised.

 

So it’s helpful to browse around your own life from time to time, or to survey the little pieces of history we know, to remember that “the mercy of the world is that we don’t know what is going to happen.”

 

It is Ours To Remember

I’m envisioning this aphorism as a call to humble action as we edge toward an election and the unknown future it will inaugurate with considerable dismay, sour-tempers, disgust, terror, crankiness, touchiness, and suspicion.

 

In CS Lewis’ Prince Caspian, Glenstorm the Centaur, reminds himself and a talking badger called Trufflehunter, “I watch the skies, badger, for it is mine to watch as it is yours to remember.”

 

It may be that remembering Trufflehunters are tottering on the edge of extinction while sky-watching Glenstorms are experiencing an invasive plant sort of overgrowth at present.

 

Rifle through the news neighborhood on your flat screen. Abruptly scroll through your Twitter feed. Peruse the daily stacks of emails clogging your inbox like a hairball. Listen to radio chatter or water cooler banter, and you’ll quickly surmise that most feel called to “watch the skies.” They are looking for signs, composing predictions, and spreading their forecasts to any who will listen. Gloomy cultural storms will stomp the future if the other candidate wins, whoever that other may be.

 

With earnestness, this “sky watching” becomes cultural guidance and voting instruction.

 

Unintended Consequences

One sky-watching species among many insists that Christians must vote for Mr. Trump even though he is hateful, degrading, and abusive. We are, the argument insists, morally obligated before the God who is watching us in the ballot box and who will enact the fine print provisions of judgment on us for the misdeeds of Clinton should we permit her to relocate to Pennsylvania Avenue. This “the devil you don’t know is better than the one you do” argument, which you’ve surely seen and to which many may be sympathetic hinges on constitution-protecting supreme court justices, preserving religious liberty, limiting abortions, and perhaps, strong national security.

 

This fairly fatalistic view neglects however, that, for instance, Roe v Wade, has been upheld for over 40 years despite during our being led by Presidents who opposed it for easily half that time. And while it has stood, the number of abortions since 1990 has fallen by more than half! Furthermore, in 5 of the 6 states where abortion rates have dropped most substantially in the last quarter century, the decreases cannot be attributed to legislative measures.

 

We don’t know what is going to happen. Apparently other factors can be at play besides what is legislated by lawmakers or enacted by judges on a court.

 

There are all manner of “sky-watching” views and they’re worth considering, to be sure. We must simply make sure we aren’t letting their predictions conspire with our fear, anger, or worried suspicion to induce mean-spirited panic or God-amnesia.

 

Most generally, there is a prescription attached to a prediction. If you choose her not him or him not her, then this awful thing will happen or be averted, or this excellent future will be thwarted, or realized.

 

Avoid the Fatalism of the Over-Confident If-Then

But we are focused on being mere badgers today.  It is ours to remember not to watch the skies.

 

God’s people are told “to remember” way more frequently than they are ever asked to predict the future. They are told to predict the future approximately zero times. They are told “to remember”, “call to mind”, and “not to forget”, exactly one gazillion times. 

 

So let’s rehearse, recall, and repeat our calling to remember we don’t know what will happen but God does:

 

When you are sick with worry about either candidate, and sure that if the one you most abhor is elected, it will be the beginning of the end, pause, be a badger to yourself, and remember that not even you knows what is going to happen. Truly. You have no idea. To presume you do is to torture yourself. Tomorrow could turn out exceptionally better than expected or dismally worse. There’s no way to know. So quit trying to know it. For your own sake!

 

The brother of our Lord, James, says as much regarding our yapping about what’ we’re gonna do next quarter, by saying essentially “You don’t even know what’s gonna happen in the morning, much less in January!...so make and speak your plans tentatively, as the future belongs to God...say instead, ‘If the Lord wills it, we will do this in January or next Friday morning.’”

 

“We Make Plans, God Laughs”

And while you are busy refusing to torture yourself or others with ridiculous over-confidence in political prognostications, bolster your memory with things like:

 

“The kings heart is in the hand of the Lord, and he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” Or “no one from the east or the west or from the desert can exalt themselves. It is God who judges; He brings one down, he exalts another.”

 

And recall that so staunchly had the Apostle Paul appropriated this sense of God’s rule behind the scenes in Jesus Christ who is “working out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” that he could tell Roman Christians under the insane, sadistic and inventively cruel reign of Nero that there was “no authority except what God had put in place and that they were to submit themselves to the governing authorities.”

 

Oh, and it’s likely that Nero beheaded Paul.

 

And it’s a mercy Paul didn’t see that coming.

 

He surely didn’t realize that’d be his fate when telling Roman Christians to submit to the God-established government even if, like Nero, that government wound up tarring and lighting them on fire like human candles.

 

Paul was apparently more interested in remembering the Ruler behind the rulers, and the Hands on the Reigns of all our tomorrows, even the eternal ones, than how good his present life became or what he might stand to lose.

 

Who Has the Final Say?

And if that doesn’t help, remind yourself like a Trufflehunter, that when Pilate granted  “the people” the privilege of choosing to exonerate either Jesus or an insurrectionist and murderer named Barabbas, they chanted with the vehement insistence of a modern day political rally, “Give us

Barabbas!” And when he replied, “You sure about this?---I can’t find a speck of dirt on this Jesus?” They just grew more and more insistent, ”Crucify him. Crucify him!”

 

In that instance, the people picked a known felon, and colluded to mow down a splendidly innocent and remarkable man in the most embarrassing way possible.

 

And when you think about that, and the supposed outcomes of whatever pick you make politically, wonder aloud, “Did they make the right choice? The wrong one?”

 

Were the eventual consequences of their sure choices even faintly imaginable to anyone but Jesus that day?

 

And then, for the world’s solace and yours, remember, like a badger whose life depended on it, we believe that “wrongly” selected man who died like a common thief; naked, abused, and abandoned, actually has, as Lesslie Newbiggin once wrote, “the final say in human affairs.”

 

We don’t know what will happen.

 

But we know the One apart from whom nothing good can happen. And we know that with him, even what was intended for evil can be converted to a stunning good.

 

And we recall that he intends to make all things new, no matter how tarnished, moldy, vile, or disconcerting they have become.

 

It’s ours to remember these things and to forget the fatalism of presuming to know what will occur if we vote for her, or him, or for another, or maybe, for none at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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