A SOUL PREPARED
by Rev. Roland McGregor
I was unprepared for 9/11/2001, and I was spiritually unprepared for 11/9/2016. As I watched the election map turn red into the midnight hours, I thought, “This is not my country.” I was dumbfounded. Thanks to “Shine Your Light” I will have better spiritual preparation for 11/3/2020. This time around I will not sell my soul to a particular outcome. Jesus warned about selling the inmost self. He said, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” On the cross when all seemed lost, he gave his soul to God. He had not given it to any other definition of victory. The spiritual struggle of our country and of each one of us is not subject to victory or to defeat but to persisting in love. Whatever happens at the end of these forty days, we will persist in raising up the downtrodden, encouraging the oppressed and calling our leaders to do the same. I may be jubilant at the outcome of the election or I may be sickened by it, but I will not be put off from loving my neighbor regardless of their yard sign. This is my country. These are my neighbors.
Rev. Roland R. McGregor is a retired pastor in The United Methodist Church, New Mexico Conference. He previously served Asbury United Methodist Church of Albuquerque and First United Methodist Church of Clovis, New Mexico, as well as churches in Texas and Puerto Rico. He is the founder of the McGregor-Kajoba Chair of Practical Christianity, an endowed professorship at the United Methodist seminary at Mulungwishi in the southern Congo (DRC).