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Praying With My Parents. Election Night, 2024
Hope glows quietly inside a small church in the South Hills of my hometown. It got cold early this year and I’m so scared. There is so much at stake and I feel utterly powerless.
Two deer walk toward my car. Toward me? Perhaps?
I mean you no harm, I try to telepath to them. I slide quietly out of my car.
Then I speak out loud, but softly, “I’m going to close my door. Don’t be alarmed.”
They aren’t. They don’t even twitch their tails at the noise. They are calm, unafraid.
“I think they were waiting for you to feed them,” my dad whispers after catching up to me. My parents had parked a few spaces down and I tried to beckon them and hush them at the same time. Not surprisingly, these deer seem used to people.
In that fresh chill of the fall air, all five of us stood still for a moment. We each breathed our white little puffs of fog into the woods — two young and unconcerned deer, and three terrified humans.
Election night, 2024. We wait under another penumbra of fear. They’re going to vote for him. Again.
We are on our way to pray for “them.” And I know I shouldn’t use the word “them” if what I truly believe is that finding common ground or building community or various other sociopolitical…