I was very pregnant with Trig when Todd and I took a rare few hours between official events on a Saturday in March 2008 and went to the movies. We had just attended the start of the Iditarod sled dog race in Anchorage, so we decided to thaw out inside a warm movie theater before attending a town hall meeting. The movie we watched was Juno.
There’s a scene from this memorable movie that I think says a lot about how many of us experience our faith. You’ll recall that the movie is about a young girl, Juno, who finds herself pregnant at sixteen. She goes on to have the baby and put it up for adoption. And because she chooses to have the baby, when the movie came out there was a lot of talk about whether Juno had a pro-life message. Some insisted that it did, while others objected just as stridently that there was no anti-abortion theme.
I remember thinking that both sides got it wrong. There was no preaching, in-your-face message about abortion in the movie, either pro or con. Director Jason Reitman was subtler and, I think, more clever than that. The scene in which Juno ultimately chooses not to have an abortion shows how.
From the moment she finds out she’s pregnant it seems like a foregone conclusion that Juno will, as she says, “nip” her problem “in the bud.” And sure enough, she makes an appointment and goes to a clinic. There’s an abortion protestor outside whom Juno basically ignores. But just as Juno is about to enter the clinic, the young, sweet protestor says something that seems to affect her. She yells, “Your baby has fingernails!” And Juno pauses. She continues into the clinic, but you can tell she’s struggling. Inside, she sees the heavily pierced receptionist texting as she monotones a greeting and asks Juno to fill out a form. “Don’t skip the hairy details,” the receptionist says, bored. “We need to know about every score and every sore.” Then she offers Juno a free condom, boysenberry-flavored. Juno can’t take it. She leaves. “I’m staying pregnant,” she tells her friend.
You could argue (as some did) that there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell in Juno if she had an abortion in the first fifteen minutes—certainly nothing very funny. But it strikes me that the reason she rethinks her automatic decision to have an abortion—hearing that her baby has fingernails—sends a very understated but powerful message. Despite all the rhetoric designed to make abortion just another “choice” that Juno and her friends grew up with, she ultimately recognizes that there is a living being growing inside her. It is a life she didn’t ask for. It is an inconvenient life at the time. But it is a life nonetheless. She just can’t bring herself to destroy it once she imagines it as something human, as opposed to an abstract “problem” to be “solved” by a routine medical procedure.
Most Americans, I think, are a lot like Juno. They don’t think in ideological or political terms about their religious faith. They may not even be actively religious at all—but they still want to do the right thing, and they want to see others do the right thing as well. Our culture encourages this by doing something unique and, I think, highly exceptional: it takes fundamentally religious values such as the sanctity of life and secularizes them without surrendering their morality. America has a special ability to take the truths and moral lessons of religion and put them to work in ways that benefit everyone, regardless of their faith.
I don’t know what Jason Reitman’s religion or his politics are—and it doesn’t matter. He made a pretty great movie with a subtle but powerful message that I recognize from my faith. Maybe others see it, too; maybe they don’t. But everyone who sees the movie understands that Juno makes a moral choice. She doesn’t act in accordance with anyone’s politics but according to the dictates of her own conscience. And the morality that informs that conscience is found in the great religious traditions of America.
Reitman isn’t alone in sneaking traditional messages into his work. I’ve been tough on Hollywood in this book, but I’m also a fan of director Judd Apatow’s films. Movies such as Knocked Up (in which a young woman becomes a mom thanks to a one-night stand with a slacker) and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (self-explanatory!) deliver the same subversive moral messages that can be found in Juno. The uniquely American twist is that the morality served up by these movies is a side dish that comes with a main course of bawdy frat house humor. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat agrees: “No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism.”
When people like Douthat point out these moral messages, critics usually reply that such moralism is necessary to sell tickets in America. But that objection just makes my point. For all that is rotten in our popular culture, it seems clear (at least to me) that there is still a fundamental desire on the part of most people, at least some of the time, to be uplifted by our public entertainment. We don’t want to be preached to. Sometimes we just want to laugh and be distracted for a couple of hours from the cares and worries of our daily lives (which is why some of us love to watch sports, too!). But we also want to see our values reinforced and not mocked or belittled on the big screen. Americans stayed away in droves from the bumper crop of anti–Iraq War movies put out by Hollywood in the last couple of years for precisely this reason. The success of filmmakers such as Jason Reitman and Judd Apatow is due to the fact that they believe entertainment can accommodate this moral impulse.
A European movie might have had Juno get her abortion in the opening scene and then spend the next hour and fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes and pondering the meaning of life. It would have been depressing and boring. Not here. Americans want to be entertained, but we also want to see people do the right thing, even when it’s hard and there is no prospect of being rewarded. Hooray for some in Hollywood for occasionally letting us see that.
There are many other things about America that prove my point that you don’t have to share my faith to benefit from what faith has given America. As the recent release of the original text of the Big Book illustrates, Alcoholics Anonymous is a great example of how religious values (by another name) have helped millions of Americans.
True story: Alcoholics Anonymous actually grew out of a religion-based recovery program called the Oxford Group. It was started in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, by a down-on-his-luck alcoholic named Bill Wilson who had a conversion experience in a hospital room while drying out from one of his many binges. By Wilson’s own account, he was engulfed by a white light and God revealed himself to him. He never drank again. He joined the Oxford Group, a Protestant movement of mainly elite Americans trying to recover from addictions. But he quickly broke away and helped create AA in order to attract Catholics and more mainstream Americans. He borrowed directly from religion and psychology to create the famous Twelve Steps. Wilson settled on twelve, he said, because there were twelve apostles.
Born of a religious conversion, AA has become a creed of personal salvation open to all. It is a secular church of self-help. No other recovery program has helped so many so successfully as this one, which famously calls on participants to begin their journey to recovery by surrendering to “a higher power.” You don’t have to be religious to join AA; you just have to have the desire to stop drinking. But it is the elements it borrows from faith that make the program work.
Even Americans who’ve never had a problem with alcohol or drugs are familiar with many of the Twelve Steps—that’s how widespread they have become. They begin by asking participants to admit their powerlessness before their addiction, recognize a greater power that can help them, make amends for past mistakes, learn a new way of life and, critically, help others who are suffering in the same way. All people of faith will recognize the ethical teachings of religion (and not just Christianity) in AA’s Twelve Steps. In short, AA says to its participants, You’re not strong enough to carry this burden by yourself. You need help. Help is here. That’s the feeling I have every time I hit my knees and pray. As a matter of fact, I keep a copy of AA’s famous “Serenity Prayer” taped inside a favorite devotional book. I glance at it occasionally and am reminded of the connectivity it creates among all:
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
The greatest proof of the success of AA is the army of imitators it has spawned. Hundreds of self-help groups use Twelve Step principles to help millions of addicts and their friends and family deal with everything from drug abuse to problem gambling, overeating, and even borrowing too much. If it’s easier for Americans of diverse faith traditions, as well as agnostics and atheists, to acknowledge a “higher power” than it is to invoke the name of God, so be it. The important point is that the Twelve Steps work—and we seem to need them now more than ever.
The diseases treated by these programs can be too often traced to the bad effects on our society of secularism and its corrosive ideology. It’s an ironic (but very American) twist that we have used a secularized version of religion to try to cure them.
Former attorney general John Ashcroft—a deeply devout Christian—used to say something I agree with wholeheartedly: “It’s against my religion to impose my religion on others.” What our culture does when it translates religious values into secular terms and applies them to useful ends isn’t about brainwashing or trying to convert anyone—quite the opposite. It’s a way of conferring a rich moral heritage while respecting everyone’s religious freedom.
All the great religions call on us to follow the Golden Rule: to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. Call me biased, but one of the best ways America follows this faith value in a secular way is in the treatment we give to individuals with special needs. Without so much as mentioning religion, we strive to treat these most vulnerable members of our society the way we ourselves would like to be treated.
I often speak to families with special needs kids. The room is inevitably noisy because the kids are running around being kids. I tell my audience not to worry and not to hush them—“That’s the sound of life”—and I just talk louder.
That these amazing moms and dads just chuckle and listen harder says so much about them. Their children aren’t easy. I know from experience that the overwhelming emotion parents have when they learn they will have a child with special needs is fear: fear that caring for a special child is too hard; fear that their marriages and their pocketbooks and their hearts won’t be able to handle it. Simply through the act of allowing their children to be born, the parents I meet are telling us something significant about themselves. Either that their belief in God gave them the courage to choose life, as it did for me, or that something in their hearts just told them to hold on and have faith, that they could handle it.
They are truly remarkable people. And although I, too, have a son with more challenges than many of us will ever encounter, I don’t count myself among their number. I am blessed with so much to support me—a wonderful, involved husband, a strong family, a caring community, and the resources we need to provide for Trig. So many of the families I meet aren’t nearly as materially blessed as we are, and yet they held on to faith and chose life. They would never approve of the term, but they’re truly heroes.
We could always do more, but America says a lot about itself in the way we support these amazing families. Not just with laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, but in our private lives; in countless individual gestures in countless communities, our faith-rooted values are put to work to help special kids and adults.
For example, I read about a special education teacher in the tiny fishing village of Port Washington, Wisconsin, who wanted to build a playground for kids with special needs. She asked her kids what they wanted to have on it. “They all said pirate ships,” she said. When she found out that the project would cost nearly $1.5 million, she almost gave up. But the citizens of Port Washington came together to make it happen. A design firm provided instructions. Businesses donated materials. Citizens gave of their money and their time. In the end, 2,800 people—a third of the town—pitched in to build the playground. Today it is a wonderland for all kinds of kids—and complete with a giant rocking pirate ship!
An American who is responsible, maybe more than any other, for challenging the low expectations we used to have of kids with special needs is Eunice Kennedy Shriver. As a child, this deeply compassionate woman had witnessed a society that did not live out its values in dealing with her mentally challenged sister, Rosemary. In those days, Americans like Rosemary were often locked away in asylums and sometimes subjected to inhumane medical procedures. Mrs. Shriver wanted to open the doors of the possible to all kids with mental and physical challenges. So in 1968, just seven weeks after her brother Bobby was killed by an assassin’s bullet, she held the first Special Olympics in Chicago. I love the message she used to open the games:
In ancient Rome, the gladiators went into the arena with these words on their lips: “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”
Today, all of you young athletes are in the arena. Many of you will win, but even more important, I know you will be brave and bring credit to your parents and to your country. Let us begin the Olympics.
It’s true that America loves winners, but there’s one thing we love more: competitors who are brave in the attempt. I think that’s why we all have such admiration for the kids with special challenges who come out to compete and have a little fun in the process. Our natural human desire to help others and see them succeed is translated easily to the playing field. Competition and hard work give all of us that sense of worth and dignity that all God’s children crave. And when someone with special needs not only tries hard, but tries hard and succeeds, we are all lifted up. One family I met told me about a deaf baseball player—the wonderfully named Curtis Pride—who proves the point.
Before he was five months old, Curtis’s parents knew something was wrong. But even after doctors diagnosed him with 95 percent hearing loss, they were determined that their boy not feel different. So they enrolled six-year-old Curtis in a local T-ball league. His first time at bat he hit the ball over the center fielder’s head and rounded the bases so quickly he passed the runner ahead of him between first and second base. What Curtis didn’t know about the rules of T-ball he more than made up for in talent and enthusiasm. He was hooked.
Curtis Pride became a standout high school athlete, graduated with a basketball scholarship at William and Mary, and was a draft pick by the New York Mets. He split his time between college and Major League Baseball until he graduated, when he began to play full time on a Mets farm club. After languishing for a time there, he went to the Montreal Expos farm club. He worked his way up through the system until one day his big break came. Reader’s Digest, in the way only the Reader’s Digest can, told the story of Pride’s first scoring hit in the major leagues:
Curt Pride was startled when Montreal Expos manager Felipe Alou yelled out his name. The Philadelphia Phillies were leading Montreal 7–4 in the seventh inning. With one out and two runners on base, Pride thought Alou would send in a more experienced pinch hitter. But Alou was calling him.
In his first time at bat a few days before, Pride had driven the ball deep to right. “I can hit Major League pitching!” he told his parents. Now his old friend Steve Grupe was in the stands to watch him play, and his new team was depending on him.
Bobby Thigpen, the Phillies’ flame-throwing relief pitcher, was on the mound. As Pride gripped the bat, Thigpen fired a hard slider. Pride waited; then at the last moment his bat exploded across the plate. The ball shot like a bullet between the outfielders and bounced all the way to the wall.
Racing around first, Pride slid into second in a cloud of dust. Safe! Both runners scored! In the stands, Steve Grupe leapt up, pummeled the air with his fists and whooped.
Excited, Pride looked to third-base coach Jerry Manuel to see if he had the green light to steal on the next pitch. But Manuel was motioning to the stands. Pride looked up. All 45,000 fans were on their feet, stamping and cheering.
As Pride stood, frozen, the thunderous ovation continued. Manuel, tears welling in his eyes, motioned for Curt to doff his cap.
Then, as the stamping and cheering reached a crescendo, something incredible happened. It started as a vibrating rumble, then grew more intense until, for the first time in his life, Curt Pride actually heard people cheering for him. The silent curtain that had separated him from his dream had parted.
Consider it sappy, perhaps, but we may as well admit it: we love these kinds of stories. And how we treat the most vulnerable—the unborn, the disabled, the aged—says something fundamental about us as a country. It’s a question not just of faith in God, but of respect for the inherent dignity of every human being. Curtis Pride’s story is a remarkable reflection on him, but it’s also a pretty good reflection on the society that helped make it happen.
Speaking for myself, I find that my faith guides me in ways large and small, consciously and unconsciously, virtually nonstop. And I’ve found some great resources for even the most mundane aspects of life’s journey. In fact, our culture has produced a vast array of inspirational books and other resources that draw on our rich religious heritage.
When I was in Georgia recently, Dr. Charles Stanley gave me one of his many books, How to Reach Your Full Potential for God. It sounds pretty heavy, but it’s full of helpful advice and wise counsel that can be applied to many of the situations I find myself in every day.
Here is Dr. Stanley on using your time wisely:
[One] important challenge you face is the way you order your time. A balanced schedule will help you be the person God wants you to be and do the things He wants you to do. YOUR TIME IS YOUR LIFE. TIME IS IRREVERSIBLE. IT IS IRREPLACEABLE . . . When you reach the age of 70, you will have lived 840 months. That’s 25,550 days or 613,200 hours or 36,792,000 minutes . . . every bit of that time is holy because it is a gift from a holy God. It is to be valued and spent in ways that honor the Giver. . . . Think of time as an investment.
It’s so important to remember that every day is a gift, especially when we feel pulled in too many directions and asked to do too many things. Dr. Stanley also taught me a great tip on how to tell the difference between the truly important and the merely urgent.
If something is presented to you as “you must decide right now or the opportunity ends,” take that as a sign that your answer should be no. An opportunity tied to a rushed or ironclad ultimatum is rarely from God.
If I had listened to what other people said about what I should do and how I should invest my energies in life, I cannot begin to fathom all that I might have missed or lost.
Had I listened to those who were skeptical that a simple Alaskan housewife and hockey mom could run for public office, I would never have had the opportunity to serve as a mayor, a commissioner, a governor, and a national vice-presidential candidate.
Had I listened to those who suggested it would be political suicide to hand the Governor’s reins over to my lieutenant governor entering my lame duck last year in office—a choice I made so that I could fight for Alaska, and America, more effectively in a different venue—then my state would have suffered from the obstruction and paralysis of my office by the politically motivated attacks that began the day I was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008.
Had I listened to the politicos (even some within my own political action committee) and shied away from endorsing candidates I knew were best for America—people such as Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley, Doug Hoffman, Joe Miller, and Karen Handel—I wouldn’t have been using my position in the best interests of the country I love.
I might also add that had I listened to the voices in our culture telling me that I should spare myself the trouble and heartache of bringing a child with special needs into the world, our family would have missed out on the most positive and life-changing thing ever to happen for us.
It’s quite bold of people we don’t even know, and who don’t really know us, to tell us what’s best for our careers, our families, and our future. Charles Stanley’s book reminds us that God did not put us on earth to have people pull us this way and that so we could do things for their benefit, their advancement, and their goals:
Certainly, we are to work with one another and help one another the best we can. But no person is to be the “author and finisher” of our lives apart from God. He has a wonderful way of weaving together everyone’s personal plans and purposes. When things function according to His will, people are helping one another even as they are working with or for one another.
But at the same time that we aren’t meant to be anyone’s slave or puppet, we are also called by our faith to understand that the purposes of life are much bigger than us and our private concerns.
Though this message is emphasized by all the great religious traditions, it also comes down to us from secular sources. I don’t claim to be a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, but Plato is supposed to have said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Whoever said it, the statement has the ring of profound truth. Our nature as humans is to be so self-absorbed that we must discipline ourselves to remember that every day, and in many ways, we yield to the changing nature of the universe. Conditions and circumstances ebb and flow, sometimes in our favor, sometimes in a way that upsets our plans or challenges our perception of the way things ought to be. Until we step outside ourselves and realize that change is inevitable for everyone, and that everyone is thus engaged in some kind of challenge, we can become overwhelmed by our own struggles. A constantly changing cosmos is the cause.
Max Lucado’s easy, clever, and inspiring book It’s Not About Me talks about how humanity came to this (difficult) realization:
Blame the bump on Copernicus. Until Copernicus came along in 1543, we earthlings enjoyed center stage.
Ah, the hub of the planetary wheel, the navel of the heavenly body, the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue of the cosmos. Ptolemy’s second-century finding convinced us. Stick a pin in the center of the stellar map, you’ve found the earth. Dead center.
And, what’s more, dead still! Let the other planets vagabond through the skies. Not us. No sir. We stay put . . . But then came Nicolaus. Nicolaus Copernicus with his maps, drawings, bony nose, Polish accent, and pestering questions.
“Ahem, can anyone tell me what causes the seasons to change? Why do some stars appear in the day and others at night? Does anyone know exactly how far ships can sail before falling off the edge of the earth?”
“Trivialities!” people scoffed. “Who has time for such problems? Smile and wave, everyone. Heaven’s homecoming queen has more pressing matters to which to attend.”
But Copernicus persisted, Lucado reminds us.
He tapped our collective shoulders and cleared his throat. “Forgive my proclamation, but,” and pointing a lone finger toward the sun, he announced, “behold the center of the solar system.”
For over half a century people denied Copernicus’s findings of fact. And when like-minded Galileo came along, Lucado reports that the throne locked him up and the Church kicked him out! “You’d have thought he had called the pope a Baptist,” Lucado observed. “People didn’t take well to demotions back then.”
Well, we still don’t. Again, from It’s Not About Me:
What Copernicus did for the earth, God does for our souls. Tapping the collective shoulder of humanity, He points to the Son—His Son—and says, “Behold the center of it all.”
As individual human beings created to participate in and contribute to good on the third rock from the sun, we’d do well to quit thinking we’re the center of it all—the center of our circle of friends, our office, our softball team, our political party. No, we are part of a much larger body. The sooner we grasp this simple and obvious truth and change our behavior, the sooner we can get beyond our “self” and get on with fulfilling our God-given purposes.
Contrary to the Ptolemy within us, the world does not revolve around us. Our comfort is not God’s priority. If it is, something’s gone awry. If we are the marquee event, how do we explain flat-earth challenges like death, disease, slumping economies, or rumbling earthquakes? If God exists to please us, then shouldn’t we always be pleased?
Could a Copernican shift be in order? Perhaps our place is not at the center of the universe. God does not exist to make a big deal out of us. We exist to make a big deal out of him. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about him. . . .
Such a shift comes so stubbornly, however. We’ve been demanding our way and stamping our feet since infancy. Aren’t we all born with a default drive set on selfishness? “I want a spouse who makes me happy and coworkers who always ask my opinion. I want weather that suits me and traffic that helps me and a government that serves me. It’s all about me.”
Lucado spears us with a funny wake-up call—the one you didn’t get from the soccer coach who wouldn’t keep score because she insisted, “We’re all winners, despite the other team scoring more goals!” You also didn’t get it from your dad if he told you not to worry about passing the ball to the open guy on your periphery because “You’re the best basketball player on the block . . . er, in the whole country! You’re the next Michael Jordan, despite the fact you’re a short white guy who can’t jump!” And then you grew up and worked for a union boss who rejected merit pay proposals because “We’re all equal so we all deserve to be compensated equally, despite varying degrees of productivity!”
Self-promotion. Self-preservation. Self-centeredness. It’s all about me!
They all told us it was, didn’t they? Weren’t we urged to look out for number one? Find our place in the sun? Make a name for ourselves? We thought self-celebration would make us happy. . . .
But what chaos this philosophy creates. What if a symphony orchestra followed such an approach? Can you imagine an orchestra with an “It’s all about me” outlook? Each artist clamoring for self-expression. Tubas blasting nonstop. Percussionists pounding to get attention. The cellist shoving the flutist out of the center-stage chair. The trumpeter standing atop the conductor’s stool tooting his horn. Sheet music disregarded. Conductor ignored. What do you have but an endless tune-up session! . . .
No wonder our homes are so noisy, businesses so stress-filled, government so cutthroat, and harmony so rare. If you think it’s all about you, and I think it’s all about me, we have no hope for a melody. We’ve chased so many skinny rabbits that we’ve missed the fat one: the God-centered life.
What would happen if we took our places and played our parts? If we played the music the Maestro gave us to play? If we made his song our highest priority?
Would we see a change in families? We’d certainly HEAR a change. Less “Here is what I want!” More “What do you suppose God wants?”
What if a businessman took that approach? Goals of money and name making, he’d shelve. God-reflecting would dominate.
And your body? Ptolemaic thinking says, “It’s mine; I’m going to enjoy it.” God-centered thinking acknowledges, “It’s God’s; I have to respect it.”
We’d see our suffering differently. “My pain proves God’s absence” would be replaced with “My pain expands God’s purpose.”
Talk about a Copernican shift. Talk about a healthy shift. Life makes sense when we accept our place. The gift of pleasures, the purpose of problems—all for Him. The God-centered life works. And it rescues us from a life that doesn’t.
But how do we make this kind of shift? How can we be bumped off self-center? Our ever-changing universe is to blame for making us think that we have to try to hold on to our perceived place of comfort—the center of it all. But finally opening our eyes to the revolving and evolving globe, the shifting sands and crashing waves, can also wake us up to the fact that change is an inevitable part of life.
That fact drives us toward some other kind of comfort. We must have a GPS set point, a guidepost. In my inaugural address as governor of Alaska, I spoke of setting my bearings by that Great North Star, which is depicted on our state flag. I told my fellow Alaskans that we were more fortunate than others, because we lived in a place that made it easy to stay on course. For we had the Great North Star with its steady light as our beacon bright, overhead in Alaska’s expansive skies!
It turns out that Trig, barely two years old, has his own version of the Great North Star. When he was a tiny little bundle, maybe three months old, we noticed that he would often lie on his back and raise his right arm, staring at his hand for long periods of time. As he grew, the hand-staring continued with amazing consistency. When other objects were introduced to distract him, he’d look, he’d gurgle and giggle and stare for a bit, then turn back to his upraised hand.
I now notice that when my little guy is in unfamiliar settings, or perhaps is tired or feeling out of sorts, he pauses to look again at his hand. We joke when we see this, “Yep, Trig! The hand’s still there! All is well.” I’ve asked other mothers of children with Down syndrome if their child does the same. Often I hear that they do, and the theory is that staring at their hands is their baseline of comfort. It’s a zone they get in to reassure themselves, to readjust internally in order to deal with some external discomfort.
Trig only recently became bold enough to want to step on beautiful, green grass. While visiting my relatives in Richland, Washington, Trig longed to play with Aunt Katie’s sweet dogs amid their water bowls on the lawn behind the house. He had never before wanted to walk on anything but the sturdy flooring inside a house or on the pavement outside. But something had now changed and he couldn’t resist.
Still not able to utter a word, Trig communicated how he would overcome his fear and reach his goal, the puppies. He would right himself as he gathered his courage by focusing on his Great North Star. He’d stare at his right hand. Take a step. Pause. Stare. Step. Cling to that beacon bright! Strength and comfort and security. The hands! I can do this! This is better than walking on water! I’ve set my bearings and now I’m gonna pet that dog! And he did!
We all navigate better with a North Star we can count on. Lucado lists promises in the Old and New Testaments that refer to our Creator’s permanence. Romans 1:20 claims God’s everlasting power. Daniel 6:26 and Psalm 59:16 show us where to go when we need a fortress and a refuge. It’s there we can readjust, gather strength, take that step forward . . . stare at the hand . . . stare at the hand . . . walk toward the water bowl! All in the midst of inevitable change.
You want to hear about change? I’ve had more than my share in the last year and a half, thank you very much. It’s as if God said to me, Here, Sarah Palin, I’ve got a few things to add to your plate. You’d better have your compass pointed due north. May I suggest you get to know the intricacies of the vein pattern on the back of your right hand? You may want to stare at it once in awhile while I load this up.
Thank God His outstretched hand was there through it all. Better His than my own. And thank God for America, whose exceptional culture smoothed the way for me, put out its arms to me, occasionally argued with me, but always welcomed me. My incredible experience over the past couple of years has made me more determined than ever that we can’t lose this magic—we can’t let go of the amazing mixture of tradition and innovation, of “clinging” to our own beliefs while we accommodate the beliefs of others—that has truly made this country great. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others built it. Tocqueville saw it. We live it. There is providence to this country. We can’t lose sight of that.
It’s been an exciting, productive, worthwhile period of tumult and change. Every chapter has been a teaching chapter and an opportunity to have affirmed what I always believed—that everyone is battling something, everyone has a challenge. But now I can more fully understand. There’s no better place to experience it than in America. Thanks, Plato.