The 2012 election in the United States of America has come and gone. President Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected to a second term. That is unlikely to be contested, to my knowledge (as a total amateur citizen in the realm of law and politics), because former Governor Romney already conceded on Election Night. To me, that was a bigger shock and disappointment - or at least it made the election result a bigger one - than just the fact of Obama's having more electoral votes. It is probably better that Mr. Romney has said he will not seek the office again because, after much promotion as the man who would lead us through hard fights to bring business back to America and undo Obamacare, he conceded the same night. If this is a measure of how he leads, perhaps it is better we saw it this way. It is true, however, that President Obama appeared to have won too many - namely all - of the "battleground states", especially Ohio, for any amount of challenging and recounting to undo the final result. Court challenges are not free and most certainly neither are the lawyers who make them. After record-setting campaign expenditures on both sides, perhaps this did in one way reflect well on Mr. Romney - unlike Obama, he didn't believe that the answer to spending huge sums with a poor result, (which expresses President Obama's "stimulus" efforts as well), was spending more. I was seriously unhappy and depressed and angry on Tuesday night after Romney conceded. It was a serious test of a big part of my salvation testimony: that once I was saved, the Holy Spirit created a spiritual "floor" through which moods of depression were unable to pull me further downward. (Remember, I'm ethnically Scandinavian - partly Swedish on one side and partly Norwegian on the other. We know about depression.) That was still true. The Holy Spirit and Jesus did not fail me. I managed to make a transition to realizing what so many others also began expressing on Facebook: that no matter who sits in the Oval Office, Jesus Christ is still seated in Heaven at the right hand of God the Father and he is bigger than any President. Not long afterward, someone I know shared on Facebook a post by Philip VanderWindt of "Route 66", a Christian ministry. He seemed to think it was very shallow of people to start posting things after the election that few had been saying before it. He was referring to the many prolific posts about, "Jesus is still King," etc. He also was referring to what he saw as a great lack of believing in prayer for authorities, which people should have been doing all along. While I myself was resoundingly innocent of that, having been trying for years to promote the monthly prayer calendar idea which has now become "PrayForAuthorities USA", the lack of success I had had for years in creating any interest in the concept hardly disproved that argument. Please don't think that I'm angry at, nor bitterly critical of, Mr. VanderWindt. I am not fully in agreement. We need to move forward as Christians and as conservatives. We need to restore our joy in Christ's salvation. We need to remind those around us that this really is not our home, that we are "strangers and pilgrims" in this world, although we may be privileged to have American citizenship and the right to vote. In the Bible, King David returned with his mighty men to the Philistine city of Ziklag where they had been living to find it destroyed, with their wives and children gone. David's soldiers were angry, depressed and grieved. Some wanted to stone their leader, (the era's equivalent of a firing squad). David - already anointed King by Samuel over Saul's vicious opposition - "strengthened himself in the Lord his God." He proceeded to track down the band of Amalekites who had sacked Ziklag - with God's help and blessing - and recover their families, including his own, plus a lot of their worldly possessions as well. What began to happen on Facebook in the aftermath of a critical battle we seemed to have lost is, to my mind, the evidence of the Holy Spirit working to mend and heal many believers' hearts and souls. It is certainly better to post, "like" and "share" that the Lord Jesus Christ is King than to angrily stomp further into the basement of vicious invective against our President. We have the right to be openly critical of him and what he does. That is given to us by our Constitution and thousands of soldiers have given their lives to preserve it. As Christians, we must still remember what James says about the tongue being "set on fire by hell" and a potent creator of trouble. How we say things is still important. Extremely important. It's part of our testimony. I am extremely happy to see post-election reminders on Facebook of Jesus still being King. Maybe some portion of those posting really do need to fill in some more solid spiritual growth behind their external professions of faith. It was still a much better response to our "Ziklag" than some other posts by dejected conservatives that I've seen. Way to go, people.
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