I was up all night watching election results. Today I am working on three hours of sleep. I am not at my best.

I wanted, however, to share a thought that a wise young woman who asks great questions inspired me to write.

Today half of the country anticipates a horrific future.

Four years ago the other half did, and four years before that, it was this group again.

So how do we handle political pain?

I think the first thing we need to do is allow ourselves to grieve. Moments like these can be bitterly disappointing. We had hope in a result and got the opposite one. They can also be deeply alienating. We face a scenario we see as terrible and expect people of good will to rally around it. And a majority or plurality of our neighbors choose the thing we think will hurt us and the people we love. And it can make us feel like we are alone, and don ‘t have whatever degree of belonging we thought. And as much as we say we’re used to people’s hurtful decisions, being in what we experienced as an abusive relationship for four years, and having the consensus be to let the abuser back in the house can be incredibly painful.

So I start with grief.

After grief I move to grace. We need to be gentle with ourselves. We need to prioritize self care. We need to pray, and laugh, and sweat, and make new friends, and maybe get a dog, We allow ourselves to live and breathe and love. We need to treat ourselves with compassion and empathy, instead of just stewing in rage, or spiraling in fear.

After grace I land on grit.

I read someone today saying that Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice needs to be understood in the context of activity.

It doesn’t just happen.

The moral universe bends towards justice because God favors our work, and our fight.

So we need to work and fight, all while stewarding over our souls.

We get to choose who gets access to us at every level.

We choose our face-to-face relationships.
We choose our media diets
We choose how much access our family and friends get to us.

One of the hallmarks of the last eight years of our politics has been the relentless media attack.

A lot of us ended up paying attention to what our enemies did every day, because they were tweeting at us every day, and saying attention-grabbing things every day, and the media was telling us what they were doing every day.

Still, we can choose how much space we give them, even as we fight.

Today I’m praying for comfort in sorrow.

So today I’m praying for peace of mind.

Today I am praying for intentional boundaries.

Tomorrow I will pray for the fight.