Looking at Elections
Through Spiritual Eyes
As people in this world, we tend to extrapolate from what we see to what we don’t see. This is our default setting. What we miss is that what we are seeing is not real. It is a surface of something else and can easily be manipulated.
This is why we need spiritual eyes. We need to be able to look past the moment filled with all its hopes and emotions and go deeper into something of much greater value and significance.
To help explain this, we have been fortunate enough to have just collectively experienced a Big Election. Let’s first look at it with our normal vision and extrapolate from what we see.
Let’s say this big, hyped election didn’t seem to go as we expected.
We expected a wave and got a trickle.
With this as our perceived result we make at least two conclusions.
First, elections are rigged and our vote does not count. Extrapolating even further, our vote and the votes of everyone else in the whole world have never counted. It has always been a rigged game.
The second conclusion is about God and goodness. Because this bad thing has happened before our eyes, it means we cannot trust God or faith or religion or church or other people in general. It is all phony and fake. The idea of spiritual eyes is just wishful thinking. It is a way of trying to make us feel good.
The result of seeing the world in this way are feelings of depression, sadness, and resentment.
Now let’s look at this election another way.
There is an election, and it doesn’t seem to go as we expected.
We expected a wave and got a trickle.
With this as our perceived result, we ask for insight. We don’t rush to conclusions. We remember earlier elections and remember how they showed evidence of foul play. Because there was evidence of foul play many got to work. Laws were passed in many places. Some of the methods of fraud were curtailed if not eliminated entirely. Surveillance was also increased this time over last. Many patriots stood up to run for elections and from all of this, campaigns were waged. Out of these campaigns the people began to see that there is an opposition to the status quo and that there is a general desire to return to the ways of our Founding Fathers. But just like the Revolutionary War was a years-long struggle, we begin to see that our warfare, involving the manipulation of information, is of the same nature.
Many lost elections we hoped would win. This is sad in itself, but we also remember that there is a strategy behind making the other side feel depressed, sad, and angry by taking their eyes off the fact that we actually achieved the most important objectives.
Now this election day has passed and slowly our eyes are beginning to see what we, at first could not, that there was indeed a profound change in the landscape.
May I remind you (I’ve written about this often) that future projections are never correct. They can’t be. Reality is more profound than our ability to imagine it.
Our initial disappointment was a reflexive one over the fact that our natural eyes did not see what they had hoped. We were disappointed that the fight continues. We wanted there to be more clarity and that we could return to “normal.”
Good morning to the reality that we never are able to go back in time, only forward. Yes, we ache to return to better times, but those times will not be the same times, just similar ones in the future, if we work toward them together.
Now is not the time to be discouraged, but to rejoice in what has actually been accomplished. Jesus told us that in this world we would have tribulation. It is this world’s default setting. But we can, none the less, rejoice that God is indeed on his throne.
Please go and comfort others with these words.
Conclusions
If we extrapolate from what we physically see and understand about this world to imagine that heaven is just a massive improvement of this, then we can be manipulated into believing, when things don’t go our way, that heaven won’t be much better.
Observe that we are never disappointed in a sunset or a sunrise but can be quite critical of firework displays. That which we see that is untouched by man has an eternal element.
Therefore, if we are not disappointed in nature’s displays of beauty and magnificence, then what God has in store for us, absent corruption, will be beyond anything we will be capable of imagining, until it comes upon us.
Don’t give up. Don’t give in.