March 5, 2016

The Scramble Comes Too Late

Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”—

-- Ecclesiastes 12:1

It’s really interesting to watch the Republican party leadership scrambling as Donald Trump inches closer and closer to the party nomination. They never expected this to happen. They laughed him off. And now, well, there’s a rollercoaster coming down the hill and it may be impossible to stop it.

I’m not voicing an opinion on the best nominee. I’m just amazed that no one from the establishment understood how unhappy people are with the way they’ve been doing things. They rule both houses of Congress and yet they still blame the current Democratic president for everything.

Don’t we do that in our own lives? We go our own way, looking neither left nor right, because we are so intent on doing things the way we want them done. Then we act surprised when others don’t go along. We knew best, didn’t we? We were doing it for their own good, weren’t we? Nobody said anything was wrong, did they?

We surround ourselves with people like us, people who will agree with anything we say or do. Like the Republicans. One major complaint is that the party is now mostly men of a certain color and certain economic status. Unfortunately for them, that doesn’t fit the demographic of most of us.

So why is Trump succeeding? Because he’s brass and outspoken and rich enough not to care what anyone else thinks. He’s what others want to be.

Except he’s not a conservative Christian with the values we all claim. What’s the difference between claiming values and living them? The time to have started praying for a true believer to win the presidency was well before now. The time to start living our faith was before we ever went to the polls. We just assumed the best man, the one we wanted to win, would do so.

We expect God to do what we want without considering our own actions. Do we truly live our faith? Not so much for most of us. We’re all about us, whether it’s politics or regular life. And that’s not biblical at all. Politics in this country stopped being about God a long, long time ago. And that is the problem, no matter which candidate you support.