I attribute my lifelong desire to live out my days of radical, devoted service to the unmerited favor of God upon me.  Simply put: I have responded to the tugging, the aching, the burden that has welled within my soul since I was a child.  There have been desperate times that I have run from this “call,” and there have been many an awful attempt to turn my back and call it quits.  Recklessly, I have distorted morality and have outright abandoned any notion of absolute truth.  However, out of the denying and hiding, the faint ember of faith has compelled me back to take ownership of that very call. 

            What compelled me to politics? My politics were shaped by Jim Wallis’, God’s Politics, and by my missionary experiences in Ethiopia.  I have come to embrace that social issues are moral issues.  As Wallis emphasizes, “There is no spiritual transformation without a personal God, and no power that can really change our lives beyond mere self-improvement” (34).  Therefore, it was God that inspired my vision in the first place, and it was God that I relied on to believe in what seems impossible.  I know that to truly see transformation, it is vital that we prostrate ourselves into the position of absolute keenness to God’s immutable will. 

           This country needs a different kind of politician—one who is not afraid to have the knowledge of and faith in a public God.  This does not mean that the outspoken intellect who can speak a sermon on demand is automatically “God’s candidate.”  It does mean, however, that a person thrust into politics has permission to hold on to God’s love so as to never attempt to separate policy from person.  Further, a person who understands Jesus’ willing availability is a step closer to understanding that God is God and that he/she is not.  A public God is one who cares for all—including the privileged and disadvantaged, poor and the rich,  and the outcasts and the in-crowds.  God, who has already seen the inevitable and worked out the unimaginable, might just have a plan that aims to include rather than exclude, honor instead of devalue, and provide instead of abandon.  

           I cannot scrutinize our politicians without evaluating myself first.  I do not dare to make conclusive remarks of candidates’ capacities based on their rhetoric.  What I will do is pray that each candidate learn to distinguish a push from God from a change in political winds.  As i pray, I will continue to own my moral outrage and dare to speak with humility on behalf of the unheard.  I hope I will be one among many aspiring and seasoned politicians who will operate as the second-in-command and remember that the worlds’ needs supercede any nonsense that comes from the ego.