Voting Like A Christian - Election Day

This morning I was up early to go vote before taking a plane to Ottawa for the rest of the week. I want to share with you what I was thinking about when I marked an X on the ballot.

To start, Christina and I were reading the bible together on Sunday night and these verses lodged themselves in my head:

The LORD takes his place in court;
he rises to judge the people.

The LORD enters into judgment
against the elders and leaders of his people:
“It is you who have ruined my vineyard;
the plunder from the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean by crushing my people
and grinding the faces of the poor?”
declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.
(Isaiah 3:13-15)

Then on Monday morning, a good friend of mine, who works on behalf of marginalized women and families who are victims of the sex industry and global slave trade sent out an e-mail to those of us who are following her work. She doesn’t really have high hopes for this election making a difference, but she can imagine change.  I asked her permission to share this on the blog:

I hope you all have had or will be having your fill of turkey this long weekend and were able to spend time with loved ones.

I am writing this because tomorrow is the day we Canadians fulfill our democratic right and vote. I have never been one who is big on politics, in all honesty coming from and now working with marginalized people groups I have never found any government or change thereof has ever made a significant difference(well except for Gordon Campbell who decimated social and women’s program’s). In fact I will go so far as to say that I believe until governments start to see social programs as a honour to provide and that we are morally responsible to take care of our least and need to stop viewing them as a drain, I am not sure I will have anything that great to say about government.

Can we all daydream with me for a minute and imagine what our country could look like if we took care of the poor, the widows and the orphans out of our first fruits instead of trying to scrape some programs together and patting ourselves on the back for for not letting them starve but providing little else. What would our country look like if we were to invest in our social programs and build stronger families, helped the single mom to get a head instead of always pointing the finger at her and telling her what she is doing wrong, make sure children with disabilities were seen for their potential not for being a financial drain the examples can go on.

In this last week alone I have had to find someone a detox bed and I could not (and I have connections!) she is out there using again because she could not wait any longer. I assisted some people to help a mom and 5 kids leave a highly abusive husband only to be told she had to many kids we cannot help her here by one agency and another solution posed was perhaps let’s put the kids in foster care (no guarantee they will stay together as a sibling group) and the mom can go to a safe house. Why would we want to take a mother’s kids away from her for leaving an abusive situation?

So with these things in mind, I’ll be casting a ballot knowing that there is not a party that doesn’t fall short of these standards.  This election has renewed my sense of the need to do more than vote. I’m convinced again of the necessity of trying to shape the system between elections rather than simply choosing from among a bunch of bad options every couple of years.

Perhaps a few of you might be willing to join me?