I’m on the mailing list for Sojourner magazine and receive an email-zine from them weekly. This week’s email had an article by Eugene Cho, a Seattle pastor, on his conversation about prayer with President Obama. You can read the whole article here (and I highly recommend it) but the following caught my attention:

I shared with President Obama that I occasionally but regularly prayed for him and this is how he responded:

??Thank you, Eugene. I really appreciate that. Can you also please pray for my wife and children? Pray for their protection.??

His demeanor changed. Perhaps, this is just me. Perhaps, I??m reading and analyzing too much into all the non-verbal cues but then again, I??m a pastor and after 21 years of doing ministry, you develop a ??pastoral sense?? and I genuinely sensed his gratitude for prayer and his request for prayer for his family.

I haven??t been able to stop thinking about our short conversation ?? and a sense of the burden and weight of his job and the ??calling?? of the Presidency. In many ways, we ought to commend the courage of all those who step into leadership ?? on any level ?? including the highest level. We can criticize all we want about our current presidential candidates but we must commend them for their courage to place themselves in such vulnerable positions.

Reading it reminded me of a chapter of What’s So Amazing about Grace? by Phillip Yancey (which *EVERY* Christian should own and read yearly) regarding Bill Clinton and the nastiness he endured as president from those who opposed him. It was painful for him to hear all the nastiness from his fellow southern Baptists (yes, Bubba was an evangelical) and Yancey talks about the hate mail he received when he wrote an article on the faith of Bill Clinton for Christianity Today magazine.

Adding to all of this is the firestorm ignited by Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) when he questioned Obama’s Christianity, saying that “Islam has gotten a pass under the Obama administration”. Apparently I’m the only one that remembers the hullabaloo about Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election?

Romans 13:1 reads as follows: “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” To me, that means that we need to acknowledge the fact that our leadership is where they are due to God’s will, whether we like it or not. I know that the litany for the Prayers of the People we use at Metanoia incorporates a prayer for our civic leaders and even though I wanted him out of office, I did not cover my ears or leave the sanctuary when that section came up and George W. Bush was president. It’s in stark contrast to the prayer emailed out by Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal which effectively called for the death of Obama in citing Psalm 109:8. (If you go one verse further, it talks about “[letting] his children be fatherless and his wife a widow”.)

This Lent, I think that one of our prayers should be for our country’s leadership. We *are* in an election year and we should be prayerfully considering the direction our country should be going.