If, like me, you were deeply disappointed in the election results, here is a letter than a friend passed on to me (and it was passed on to her). These are not my words, and I do not personally know the source, but I was able to read this and understand things a little more clearly.
I think I’m like many of you – in shock.
We just held a presidential election and I think for many of us we were shocked by the results. As concerned, engaged citizens we were fearful for our country’s future and did everything we could to reverse what we saw as a rush to catastrophe. Most of us didn’t just vote for Mitt Romney but millions of people were also anxiously engaged in doing their part to help get him elected.
There were millions of people who not only worked tirelessly to get out the vote for Romney but a large number of them fasted and prayed for divine help. Today, many of those God-fearing people are trying to understand why God didn’t answer their prayers. I know because I’m one of them.
The question that has been weighing heavily on my mind is: Why did God allow a good, decent, righteous man who had the skills and experience necessary, both temporally and spiritually, to lead our country out of its moral decline, lose to a man who is so clearly the cause of many our country’s problems? I just couldn’t understand why God would let that happen when so many righteous citizens worked so hard while putting their faith in God to bless their efforts. That’s why Tuesday’s election result didn’t make any sense to me.
Then, last night, I began to see things differently. I began to realize that I had been looking at God in the wrong way. The answer to my question is found in the book of Enos.
Enos was the son of Jacob, who was the brother of Nephi, the son of Lehi. Like me, there came a time in his life when he had an inner struggle. In his case, he wanted to know if God had forgiven him of his sins and his desire for an answer to that question caused him to one day kneel in prayer all day long, Finally, his prayer was answered and God let him know that his sins had been forgiven.
Filled with joy, Enos then prayed for his nation, the people of Nephi. He cared about them and wanted God to forgive them of their sins. However, the answer God gave him is instructive for us today, at this time in our country’s history.
God said, “I will visit thy brethren according to their diligence in keeping my commandments. I have given unto them this land, and it is a holy land, and I curse it not save it be for the cause of iniquity; wherefore I will visit thy brethren according as I have said; and their transgressions will I bring down with sorrow upon their heads.” (verse 10)
Like Enos, me and millions of others, had prayed mightily unto God for our brothers and sisters in America, pleading with God to forgive us of our national sins and heal our land. Like Enos, we expected that God would grant our request if we prayed fervently enough and were sufficiently diligently in our efforts. Like Enos we were full of hope that God would grant our desire since He had forgiven us of our sins.
But God did not grant Enos his desire to save his people from their sins. Instead God said that He would bless the Nephite nation according to how diligence its people kept the Lord’s commandments. In other words, it is up to the people of a nation as a whole to determine their fate.
You and I can pray for forgiveness for our sins, but we cannot pray for and in behalf of a nation. A nation is a living organism. It is one body, made up of many individual parts and, as such, a nation can only receive forgiveness of its sins when it, as a whole, keeps God’s commandments.
God did hear the prayers of the righteous. We had been praying for a long time for God to give us someone who would be a good leader for our country and God answered that prayer.
Regardless of what you thought of Romney’s policies, he was a good, decent, God-fearing man. We all have skeletons in our closet but God gave us a man who had none. It would be extremely hard to find another politician who has the moral character of Mitt Romney and who had the skills necessary to help put our country back on its economic feet. He was what this country needed. So God did answer our prayers when He gave us Mitt Romney.
But then we thought that God would surely bless him to win the presidency however that is where we made our mistake. God didn’t anoint Romney to become president. Instead He put before us a choice and said, “.If it seem evil for you to serve the Lord then choose ye this day whom ye will serve” (Joshua 24:15).
God gave us Mitt Romney and then left it up to us as a nation to chose who we wanted to serve – Romney or Obama. Tuesday, our nation, as a whole, thought it was evil to serve the Lord and we chose Obama. That is not an exaggeration. That is an undeniable fact.
Three times during their national convention the Democrats voted to exclude God from their platform while affirming their support for abortion and for gay marriage, while at the same time mocking the concept of traditional marriage. Instead of having a Christian prayer to open their convention, they welcomed a Muslim day of prayer.
Obama has not only lied repeatedly to the American people but has done so brazenly and unashamedly. Obama’s policies have not only brought about severe economic destruction, causing tens of millions of people to suffer great hardships, but they have swept aside constitutional safeguards and put at grave risk our cherished freedoms.
This past election the choice that was placed before us could not have been more starkly different in the character of those seeking our votes. God gave us the best person He could find and then left it up to us as to whom we wanted to serve. As a nation, we rejected God’s candidate and instead chose someone who thought it evil to serve the Lord.
God didn’t fail us. We failed God.
I think Rush Limbaugh expressed it best when he said, “If nothing changes the track we are on, we are facing a financial collapse. And as we've seen in Greece and Spain, the people that live there don't care that their countries are collapsing. They just want their pensions, and they want their checks, and they want their union contracts to continue to be paid. They don't care what's happening to the country… The only way the average Obama voter is gonna care about that is if it's gonna personally interrupt the flow of goodies, or whatever he's getting from government.
“People are not going to vote against Santa Claus, especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus. Romney's recipe was: American route to success is hard work. Today that gets sneered at. In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? Romney did offer a vision of traditional America and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren't doing enough to help those who aren't. And that resonated… I went to bed last night thinking, we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking we've lost the country.”
But we didn’t just reject God’s candidate, as a nation we rejected God Himself. Glenn Beck explained, “Last night we voted for financial suicide, military suicide, moral suicide... There were a ton of ballot initiatives voted on as well. Here are few. In Florida a measure was passed to allow public funding of abortion. It passed by ten points, 55% to 45%. On immigration, Maryland voters allowed in-state tuition for certain undocumented immigrants. They’re calling it a state wide Dream Act. They also voted to legalize gay marriage In Washington State and Colorado voters passed an initiative that would allow people over 21 to smoke pot under certain licenses as long as the state can make money.
“In California they voted 68% to 31% to drop the “three strikes’ law which imposes a life sentence when the offender’s third felony is classified as serious or violent. What this means is that there will be fewer harsh sentences for violent repeat offenders. Harden criminals will get more opportunities to get back out in public and commit more crime.
“Massachusetts just passed a law allowing the use of medical marijuana by a 63% to 37% margarine. In an extremely close vote there 49% voted for legalizing assisted suicide. That initiative lost by just 2%. Nationwide there were 31 tax measures on the ballot, more than any other issue and most of them won. Taxes on the rich, more sales tax, more tobacco tax, more income taxes.”
On Tuesday, November 6, 2012 the people of the United States of America had the opportunity to freely chose how they wanted to be governed. God did not make that choice for them but instead allowed them the right to make those choices for themselves. We not only choose Barack Obama to lead us as a nation but we also choose to fund abortion with public money, to institutionalize gay marriage, legalize the use of a harmful drug, and force people to give more of their money to the government in exchange for the government taking care of us.
That was OUR choice. As such, we chose not only to reject God’s candidate for president but we also chose to reject God’s moral principles so we could engage in immoral behavior.
But what about those who profess to believe in God? Are there just not enough of us? Exit polls revealed that 50% of Catholics voted for Obama even though their church leaders were strongly urging them to vote of Romney, while 42% of Protestant voted for Obama and 69% of the Jewish vote went for Obama. In the religious Black community, many of their pastors preached against Obama’s stand on gay marriage yet 93% of African Americans voted for a man who values are opposite theirs.
But that’s not the worst of it. There was a lower voter turnout in 2012 than there was in 2008. God has given us the right to decide for ourselves but only 58% of those eligible to vote took the opportunity to exercise that right. Instead, 42% decided to stay home because they didn’t think it was important to vote.
The Lord warned Enos that when the time should come that his people choose evil over good and disregard His commandments, that “their transgressions will I bring down with sorrow upon their heads.” God cannot reward nor punish us for what He does. That would be unfair. Therefore, God places before us a choice and then waits to see what OUR decision will be.
Tuesday we made our choice and now God will make His. And when the consequences of our decisions finally do come to pass, we will have no one else to blame but ourselves.
Ron
In God We Trust
I (back to me) hope that this brought at least a few of you some peace, I know it did for me. At the hope that Romney would be elected we had plans to expand our business, both to grow our current branch and to possible open one up in another location. The cold, hard truth is the Obama is anti-business. So as business owners we will be much more cautious, and take on as little debt as possible. As concerned citizens we will try to build up our savings, and definitely build up our food storage. I am not sure how bad things will get, and I hope that they do not get bad, but logically that is the road we are on. Over the last week I have started to think much less about extravagances and much more about necessities. Elections have consequences, and frankly I hope that the blind Obama supporters feel the consequences the most. That will give me some small (un-christian) satisfaction. God bless! (for those of us who still believe in a God...and we are apparently the minority)
