I’ve had this notecard hanging in our kitchen for the past six years. Sometimes people ask what it means. Sometimes, they remember the viral video during Covid – a woman asking her mother’s advice as the pandemic gripped our country with fear.
Just go quietly on.
I’m thinking of that message this morning with my new part-time job of keeping my phone from blowing up as we near midterm elections. I can’t delete the emails and texts quickly enough. And my recycle bin is filled with aggressive flyers – I chunk them on my way back in from the mailbox; I don’t even want the faces and rhetoric on my kitchen counter.
Politics is an overwhelming burden for our country right now. And I’m no historian, but from my public education lens, I think it’s been an overwhelming burden since 1776. We’ve had some real heroes in our country, heroes who have saved lives and given us something to admire and chase after in terms of sacrifice and integrity. And we’ve had some real hoodlums. Still have some of each.
Similar to Covid 2020, there’s a lot of unrest in the air these days. Yet this political fear is not a new dilemma. Thousands of years ago, King Solomon recorded some simple advice: God-devotion makes a country strong; God-avoidance leaves people weak (Proverbs 14:34).
I can already hear the outcry, “We are not a Christian country!” And others… “We ARE a Christian country!” The arguments, in many countries and over many years, keep on keeping on.
Even before King Solomon, in the story of Exodus, the Hebrew people were beaten and enslaved and pretty miserable. But they were on to something – worshiping the one true God. The ten plagues that God brought against the Egyptians are drama enough for any filmmaker to salivate over – astounding, actually. From rivers turning to blood, desecration by gnats and locusts, culminating in the death of every firstborn in the land – livestock and human, both.
Egypt never claimed to be a God-fearing country. But God did not claim to be the God of Egypt. He claimed to be God over ALL. The God of creation, over all the world, since before the world began, and forever. His personal name, YHWH, is translated as LORD in our English Bibles – I AM WHO I AM. God is eternal, and his presence is with us.
King Solomon’s proverb was not a political statement. It was a truth statement. God-devotion makes a country strong, and God-avoidance leaves us weak. As a country, as individual people. This goes for the US or England or Africa or Egypt, or anywhere in between. This goes for you and for me.
So back to my phone and recycle bin. In this disturbing political era of far-left and far-right and everything – absolutely everything – in between… how are we to cope? I find myself glancing up at that notecard in my kitchen pretty often.
Just go quietly on.
“We go quietly on… because he holds our hand. We don’t have to be scared of anything.”
I don’t know how this election will go, for my beloved Texas or for our AMAZING country. I don’t know what the future holds. But this message, the true message of the True God who is with us and for us and over all things, brings immeasurable peace.
For all that your heart (or phone! or mailbox!) is burdened with today, let Esther Walker’s message below be a soft spot to fall. Real encouragement. And worth every second of the four minutes.
Esther Walker in the video reminds me a bit of my maternal grandmother, Esther Gilbreath. Admittedly, my grandmother Esther may have presented as a tiny bit spunkier, but both women share a firm trust in God and his promises. They both held God’s word in their hearts, full and spilling over.
