Thanks and Thanks Again

I'd like to thank anyone who prayed for my grandmother. Things are going much better now, although your prayers continue to be helpful. Prayer is certainly powerful, at any rate, and I appreciate it very much!

In all of the commotion, life indeed did trump blogging (I think that is MeanDean from blogs4God that coined that phrase), and not only blogging but BlogShares activities as well. It seems the BSEC election has come and gone, and even though I didn't win, I want to thank everyone again for your support. While the election certainly wasn't “real,” I really appreciate your real support. In reality it was a blessing I didn't win anyway considering how crazy the last week has been. Anyway, as I said, I really appreciate support. Because of my friends here in the blogosphere I still ended up in 7th place, not bad considering many of those running had far more name recognition than I did.

That actually is an interesting demonstration of how it would be very possible, if we as Evangelicals really tried, to make a much larger political dent than we do right now. In the BlogShares example, to the best of my knowledge, every regular reader of asisaid.com was kind enough to vote for me. They knew me, knew where I stood, and made an effort to go vote. On the other hand, while some of those who won have very popular blogs, none of them won by a large margin. The name recognition didn't really help them as much as you might expect. I was running without any name recognition, and for a time made it all the way to third place (out of six seats).

In the real political world there is similar power in unknown but well supported political hopefuls. If Evangelicals could focus our energies on promoting political candidates that we thought best represented our concerns and didn't automatically assume we didn't have a chance to influence the “system,” we very well could rally enough support as our people would have a reason to go beyond the average 30% voter attendance. Think about that: if just 30% of the country supports traditional values, and unlike the other 70%, it mustered 80% voter attendance on election day, that 30% could be more powerful than the 70% majority that only has 30% active voters.

This would be a major victory for traditional values! If we, as those supporters, did this, we could let candidates know that we wouldn't just vote for the lesser of two evils. We wouldn't compromise on positions concerning embryonic stem cell research just because the other choice is to compromise on the entire pro-life agenda. Instead, we would be able to hand pick the candidates that actually stuck to pro-life views across the board (while it was lost in the shuffle after 9/11, don't forget many leading Republicans — “prolife” ones — supported and continue to support destroying embryos to create new stem cell lines).

Even if it didn't work out that well, but like my BlogShares run, only placed the candidate at a small-margin loss, it would still serve to let the politicos know that name recognition alone wasn't going to keep them going — they must also remember the powerful force that Evangelical Christianity can be and should be.