My prayer for election day... mercy, not justice.
Father in heaven,
It is 4:00am and many times I have sought to plead with you at this hour. I ask your forgiveness for at times doing so more out of sheer desperation than deliberate intent. My failure in doing so abuses your love, and causes me to trust more in my work, effort, and skill than in your gift of grace. A gift which I do not deserve, a gift that is profoundly unique, and one that has changed my life, heart, mind, and hopes forever.
Lord this morning I ask you not to make my life more comfortable, because even in a year where I've largely been without full time employment - you met and fulfilled the needs I've had for the opportunity to work, put food on my family's table, pay my debtors, and watch you provide. On this level God I am grateful for your abundance, I am grateful for the stretching it has forced me into. Teaching me to trust even more deeply in your promise to love, care for, and bless your children.
Lord this morning I do not ask you to watch over my loved ones, or to protect those who are important to me. My Lovely Bride, my son with special needs, my family who are always extended in distance from me You've cared for, kept safe, and protected even in this traumatic economic season, even in this season of danger brought on by those who wish us dead, and even in seasons of our own disobedience. Lord there is no need to beg for Your protection on those I love, because I have seen it with my own eyes.
Father today I spend this time with You to request one simple thing. It is something we as a nation do not deserve, and yet I ask with boldness. Not because I feel a righteous wind to put an expectation upon You, nor because I have the audacity to dictate to You, but because I have great fear what we may become as a nation if You do not grant us this.
Certainly there are many things we do deserve as a nation. If You did destroy the Old Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their incessant immorality, for their defiance of You, then surely the tone of our actions insisting upon our own definitions of sexuality, morality, and even marriage are behaviors that deserve every bit the wrath You leveled then.
Certainly if you meant the words Your Son spoke in His warning to us not to so much as damage the hairs upon the head of a child, then there must be millions degrees of judgment and punishment that we are deserving of for allowing the most vulnerable among us to be slaughtered in numbers that are in excess of all of our wars in our nation's history combined.
Certainly as You've instructed Your people--those You've redeemed--to help care for widows, orphans, poor, and sick, You did not mean for us to level against them greater poverty, isolation, and sickness.
Certainly it has grieved You that at times in even our recent history such evil existed that force was required to halt it.
Certainly Father You've had many reasons to be disappointed with those who have been charged with teaching and instructing Your children. The words they have not spoken--especially from the pulpits of those who lost their love for You--in exchange for access to a politician who has used them, even to hurt them.
Father if these and even a much longer list that could be compiled do grieve you then the obvious is clear, You would be right, You would be good, and You would be righteous in giving to us what we as a nation deserve--to be turned over to the spoils of our own lust, our own ideas to eliminate you, and our own drive to recreate this blessing you established known as America--to allow us to be judged.
Father it appears as though we are on the verge of electing for the first time in our nation's history someone who is diametrically opposed to You in his soul, his core, and certainly his actions. He is a lost man who according to his own writings barely understands who he is much less how he is to fit in to the surroundings and community around him.
He is a confused man, with ideas that violate Your principles, who does not respect your Lordship, but uses you to advance a power base, and seeks to establish the greatest gathering of consolidated power in the history of planet earth.
He has betrayed his immoral intentions, he has laughed at the suffering of Your chosen people, he has made a mockery of the ideal of what America is, he has applauded the redefining of Your institutions of family and marriage, and he has gone to public policy combat for the right of a hospital named for Your Son to starve to death those You instructed us not to harm.
He has allowed his family to be saturated with invective of racial hatred towards those who are different than him. And he has done so in Your name.
Father none of our choices as a nation were perfect in our election cycle, and certainly all of them have failed You, as have I, sometimes repeatedly in our lives. But this is a far cry different, Lord, than one who promises to transform our hope and trust that is to be reserved for You, and You Alone, and place it into the muck and mire of leftist, Godless, progressive political manipulation--that pretends as though Your will is open to the highest bidder.
God in all likelihood the election of this man would be justice leveled against us in many ways. The suffering that he portends for those who follow You especially seems a certain degree of punishment for not representing You as faithfully as You have called us to.
Yet Father in my simple way, I wish to beg for mercy on behalf of Your church, the voices of the redeemed who still wish to see Your work expanded and grown, who wish to be part of bringing Your hope to those in need and your love to those who hurt not be curtailed.
Lord God in Heaven it is you who establishes rulers and kingdoms. And in this nation You have been so gracious that you have allowed us--we the people--to be the ones who rule. I ask Father, beg actually, that you would allow us to rule mercifully today.
And Father if it is Your will that we receive judgment and punishment for our wickedness instead, create within us a humility that learns from what You wish to do in our lives. In other words Father allow it to draw us closer to You!
We beg for mercy, but we trust in You.
In Your Son's name I ask this...
Amen