What a day a difference makes

I was talking to a student the other day who was totally stressed out by all the political hoopla of an election year. An interesting conundrum because I’d also spoken to several students that same day who didn’t vote in the last election because 1) they didn’t register 2) they didn’t care enough to be bothered with it.

One student told me she didn’t vote because she didn’t know how to register.

Don’t scoff. I had a war widow during the last presidential election who wrote to ask me where did she need to go to register to vote. She had never voted in her lifetime. She was over 50 years in age. It was time, she said, that she exercised the freedoms her husband fought for and died for in Iraq.

If you need to register to vote you can go to the elections office at your county courthouse and they can help you or you can go to this site online.

That student wasn’t the only person who’s mentioned to me lately how stressful this election season is and we are just getting started. A friend sent me a link to this article in the Utah paper talking about the disparaging ways in which Romney’s faith is being attacked. And the truth of the matter is that there are plenty of Evangelicals who would applaud an attack on Romney’s faith, while dismissing Gingrich’s unfaithfulness. We are such a duplicitous people.

Don’t expect Mark Driscoll to be dismissing Gingrich’s unfaithfulness anytime soon, though. Over at his site Matthew Paul Turner has detailed for us the Contract for Church Discipline that Mars Hill issued to a man in the church who owned up to being unfaithful to his fiance. *Insert Eye Roll here. And Rachel Held Evans has taken on the question of whether Driscoll discourages her the way he does so many women who love Jesus.

I was thinking about all this and more today as I was making the drive from Ellensburg home. I commute to Central Washington twice a week to teach. I usually drive up and back in the same day but Tuesday’s drive was awful due to freezing rain. It started just west of the Tri-Cities and didn’t let up until I was in Yakima. The drive over Manastash Ridge was bone-dry in the afternoon but by evening, when class was over, the pass was socked in with fog and freezing rain. I debated whether I should make the drive or stay the night and finally decided I’d stay the night. I err on the side of caution when it comes to icy road conditions.

I’m glad I waited.

The drive home today was stunning. Gloriously sunny. Everything was dusted in snow, except for the roads. They were dry. There’s a lot of farmland between home and Ellensburg, a couple of rivers, not much traffic, and a few dairy farms.

On the right day, a day when you don’t have to worry about freezing rain, the drive makes for good daydreaming. You could write whole books on that drive. You can do a lot of praying. Or you could, as I often do, just marvel at the beauty of the world in which we live.

Sometimes I get so busy trying to fix the things wrong with this world, or more often so busy telling God about all the things that need fixing, that I fail to tell him what a wonder the world already is. I don’t marvel enough at all that God has already done. Do you?

We get too stressed out trying to right the wrongs of this world. Sometimes all we need is time, time for the fog to lift, time for the chill to subside, time for the sun to shine. What a day a difference can make in the way we see God

and the world He created.