I write for A Deeper Story today, the day before the US presidential election. For two months I’ve thought about where to go with this post. Do I talk about the election? Do I talk about the candidate I favor? Do I write an analysis of the big issues this season? I’ve started half a dozen posts in my mind, and then discarded them.

Then I remembered the first time I voted in a presidential election. I was a college student during the Clinton years, and the naysaying was just as hysterical as it is today. Here’s a snippet.

Fifteen years ago, I was a student at a conservative Christian college, where people took great pride in finding new and creative ways to put down President Bill Clinton. His bid for re-election was my first presidential election, and I had proudly voted straight-line Republican on my absentee ballot. A year later after his re-election, I was spending long nights in the student newspaper office on the third floor of the arts building. The other editors on staff and I labored over headlines and layouts for that week’s paper and discussed politics of the national and the collegiate.

The news was awash with scandals and calls for impeachment, and we joked, as only celibate college students could, about oral sex and interns. Yet, even as I laughed at the idea of an intern hiding under the POTUS’s desk in the Oval Office, I couldn’t help but think about all the doomsday predictions made by Christians during Clinton’s first and second campaigns and how none of those predictions had come true. Sure, he had lived up to his womanizing reputation. But aside from our self-righteous hypocritical conversations about what constituted sexual intercourse (who better than Christian college students to know where the lines are and how to get right up to them without actually crossing?), my life and the nation’s circumstances hadn’t changed.

Read the rest on A Deeper Story, where I talk about the stock we place in elections and the stock God places in them.