Praying for Politicians

 Tomorrow is election day. I will not vote. I am serene and confident that this is the right thing.

Today I am praying for politicians. I like to pray for them from time to time. Pray for them as persons, as souls. Disregarding, temporarily, their policies and politics, their status and public facade. I imagine each as just another person, like myself, standing needy before the Mercy of God. I pray for their spouses and marriages. Donald and Melania, Joe and Jill, Barack and Michelle, George and Laura, Bill and Hillary. 

I expect that this does something for them. A little something. I believe in the efficacy of prayer. I am not wasting my time.

But it does a lot for me. I see them reduced in stature: they lose their diabolic grandiosity. They become vulnerable, finite, fleshly, needy, fallible, weak. I become tender to them. I step away from the fury, indignation, hysteria, self-righteousness, anxiety, and envy that has come to possess politics. I become myself, just another person, like each of them, needy and weak but precious in God's eyes. 

This election will come tomorrow and be gone the next day. It is not Armageddon. It is not the end of the world. It is not the beginning of a new era. My life will continue on the same path. And they, hopefully, will be freed of illusions of grandeur and come to know the tender love of our God.