Yesterday, around ten o’clock, Harding campus basically went crazy. Zane told me this morning that when McCain conceded, ten guys simultaneously stuck their heads out of their room and screamed, um, non-Harding-like words at the top of their lungs for all of the dorm to enjoy. Numerous people are sporting black to mourn the “death of our country.” By next semester, it’s probably going to be a pretty lonely place around here because almost everyone is planning a move to some remote West Indian island. If you’ve been on Facebook, then you have probably either greatly enjoyed (as I have) the highly humorous statuses concerning, for the most part, the wonders of the Canadian countryside, communism, and the questionable identity of our soon-to-be-president (speculations range from the reincarnation of Hitler and Hussein to the Antichrist and the Joker), or you’ve been making your own similar statuses. The pretty small minority of Harding students have been rejoicing; the others have been looking about as glum as if you had told them, say, that the mysterious meat in the stew they ate last night was actually the remains of their missing dog Sparky, or that the sun was going to explode around, oh, January 20.
I am not going to state my political stance here. At this point, I no longer feel that my political orientation matters very much. However, I am going to ask that you take a quick journey with me for the next few minutes.
Right now, you are sitting at your computer, reading my blog. Next, you blink, and you find yourself standing on the tallest building in your respective town, be it Searcy or Henderson or Birmingham or wherever. You can see people hurrying about their business, going to work, playing frisbee, studying, grocery shopping, honking at the old lady who fell asleep at the traffic light, buying ice cream for our children from the truck with the annoying music blaring from its speakers.
You blink again, and you are standing on top of the Empire State building with a souped-up telescope that can see for amazing distances. You can see all of New York City, all of New York state, most of the surrounding states, and with your mind’s eye you can see the rest of America, spread out before you like a vast throw-rug, speckled with cities and plains and forests and lakes.
Blink. Mount Everest now, and the entire world, vast, pulsing, breathing, pollution and clean water, immense slums and the palaces of Dubai, billions of people rushing, rushing, stopping, dying, living, loving, existing. So many people, so many countries, our entire vast globe.
You take a deep breath, and little puffs of moon dust swirl up around your feet, and you look down at the world, strangely silent. They say the Great Wall of China is the only manmade structure you can see from space, but it’s not true. You can’t see any. Blue and green and brown and white, moving, undulating.
Another heartbeat passes, and you’re past Pluto, floating 2001-Space-Odyssey style in a pod, but you’re not chasing the monolith, you’re staring back at the Solar system, and at the most, Earth is a tiny speck reflecting the sun’s light.
Blink, blink, blink, and you’re whirling backwards, out and out and out, the stars and star systems and quadrants and galaxies and galaxy clusters blurring into a rush of light and darkness until finally, you’re on the edge of existence, hung suspended between the void and the largely vague, open-ended concept of reality.
Where’s America? you might ask. For that matter, where’s Earth? Where’s the sun, our sun? Where’s the Solar system? The Milky Way? Even our galaxy cluster?
Whether you are religious or not, the reality remains that in the grand scheme of things—and I mean the very grand scheme of things—we are insignificant. You as an individual are so minute as to be invisible, nonexistent, and compared to the vast expanse of our universe, so is America—so is Earth—so is even our solar system. Pull back, pull back—the overwhelming nature of a presidential election shrinks until it vanishes, a candle puffed out by the roar of the solar wind. To use the worn-out cliche, life goes on, especially on the cosmic scale, where gravity and black holes and supernovae occur whether the planet Earth exists or not, but also on the local scale—people are still getting born and saved and married and buying and selling; whether the nation’s gone to pot or not, we will still survive, one way or another. And if we imagine even a worst-case scenario for the outcome of Obama’s election to the presidency, our country still will not suffer even a fraction of the hardships other nations have undergone—and withstood—over the centuries. And even they have managed to find peace, and happiness, and the small joys of life (and that’s where one finds meaning anyway, n’est-ce pas?)
The staggering majority of human beings play out their small parts on the immeasurably expansive stage set of life, probably doing little more than sweeping before a minor rehearsal or adjusting a few knobs in the light booth—but within the own microcosm which we affect and effect, the difference is dramatic and significant in a very real way.
If you are religious, and particularly in a Christian sense, we are still largely insignificant—entirely insignificant—in face of the entire, ambivalent universe. However, God’s grace—a concept I am only beginning to understand—gives us our significance, so although from a human standpoint (or a non-arrogant one, anyway) we are nothing, God makes us something. And we can take this something which God has placed in each of us, these little ghost-lights of eternity, and use them to pour out lonely little spotlights our own small spheres of influence. Rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, communist or democratic, Eastern or Western—we can only change the world one step at a time, letting our lives serve as aqueducts for God’s love.
Consider the following story from 1 Kings 19 (which I’m fairly certain I’ve written about before, because I believe in its principle so strongly):
The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
For the most part, I firmly believe, God works in the whispers, not in the great fires, or the earthquakes, or the presidential elections. We ants, we dust specks, we tiny motes of insignificance in the face of galactic forces and dramas, we serve as the underground pipelines funneling God’s love into the world—and as long as we avoid allowing the overarching, faceless issues from clogging our veins with rust and mineral deposits and fungus, whether McCain or Obama or Pol Pot are running the country should not make a difference on the eternal scale. We must stand at the mouth of the cave, listening to the whispers and carrying their message back to the people chained below—and perhaps, one day, free them. Below, the words of Christ:
… seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
One day at a time. One step at a time. One small change at a time by individuals, and the face of the world can shatter and realign itself in a pattern more brilliantly beautiful than the mistakes or successes of one single man could ever design.
The New Infamy 
