Political. And Personal.

I’ve tried to write this post half a dozen times. It keeps coming out all wrong. So I am done trying to sound pretty. Enough has been said on all positions in the political spectrum. I do not want to tell anyone how to vote and I do not want to try to convince someone who disagrees with me to change their mind. I don’t want to defend my stance on the issues.

Instead, I want to tell you how this election season has made me feel. I want to share with you my personal experience of this political mess.

In the jumble of emotions and heated opinions that have dominated the last six months of our lives, there is one feeling that rules them all: pain.

Underneath everything. I am really, truly hurt.

I am hurt because it took 100 years after women got the right to vote to get a viable female candidate. I’m hurt because I don’t support the one we’ve got.

I am hurt because this election has shown me more of the ugly side of humanity, of my very country.

I am deeply wounded by the experience of watching our Republican nominee rise to popularity.

To know friends and family have voted for this man feels like a swift punch in the gut. Have you never heard me? Have you not been watching?

To see my fellow Christians support him astounds me. Do we read the same Bible? Are we looking to the same Jesus?

Honestly, it’s not just that my feelings are hurt – though that should be enough – it is that my very identity, the intrinsic worth of my personhood, the core of my life’s call been continually undermined, devalued and attacked by the rhetoric and actions of not only our Republican nominee but many of those who support him.

I’ve held the hand of a rape victim in the ER. I see what happens after that “grabbed p****y”
If not for the immigrant, I would never have met the love of my life. (Indeed, he would not have been born).
I’ve sat with a young woman while she made the choice to terminate or continue a pregnancy.
I witness daily the trauma of poverty, the abysmal inequity of education and healthcare among socioeconomic classes and the spiritual effects of institutionalized, as well as blatant, racism.

Words have power. Have you forgotten, fellow Christians, that the Creator spoke the world into existence? How can anyone ignore the words that have been spoken this election? Does anyone else out there feel this pain?

Anyway – it’s too late for arguments. In a days time we will decide as a nation. Some of you have already voted.

I wish I could be eloquent. I wish I had the energy to be persuasive. I am at a loss and cannot. There is no neat and tidy way to sum this up. I just hurt.