Why has election day left me homesick? I miss my grandparents today. Miss sitting in their kitchen watching Grandma roll up the top of her white, cast iron stove to cook the noon meal. In high school, I would drive to their house wrapped by peach orchards when the crowded high school halls closed in, when kids I didn’t know pressed into my space, pressed into my spirit. My grandparents were everything safe and steady, a home of rules and manners and rural life rhythms. You cleaned your plate, and pulled your weight, and waved to Pops when he drove off on his red, Massey Ferguson tractor. Life didn’t feel complicated. Life felt cut and dried like the jerky Grandma made out of the ducks and geese Pops hunted come winter.

With the first migrating flocks of geese flying over our house last month, I mailed in my ballot. We’ve voted absentee since living in Germany more than twenty years ago on an Army base in Buedingen. Stationed in the 1st Cavalry Regiment, Scott patrolled the East Germany border in a Scout helicopter. The 1992 presidential election brought me to tears there. I can’t recall all the reasons why. Bush was my choice, not George W., his gray-haired father. My nonmilitary friends, all fresh out of college, voted for Clinton because he was young and played the saxophone. “He’s sexy,” a girlfriend explained. How silly and shallow is that? I thought. Picking a president for his sex appeal.

The 1996 presidential election hardly registered on my life meter. Two little girls were teaching me how to be a mom and Scott was growing his hair long and surveying for my dad’s California engineering firm. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” emerged during the times. My uncle approved of this military agenda. Gay and Republican, Uncle approved of Clinton’s economics even more. The money rolled in and America’s homefront basked in high spirits, perhaps because our president played the blues away on that saxophone I despised during his first election. Like me, America was self-focused and sassy, still relatively untouched by terrorism. The country grew big in her britches, and I bought a black wig to dress as Monica Lewinsky for a Halloween party, but ended up staying home watching our girls play with the wig instead.

I hadn’t met Jesus yet in the 1990s, hadn’t read Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6.

What does this mean? “and the government shall rest on His shoulders?” This prophecy was penned nearly 600 years before Christ’s birth, a hundred years before God’s people were taken into Babylonian captivity. It’s a future promise, even today, it remains up ahead.

When He walked the earth, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place” John 18:36. Jesus goes on to say, “for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” John 18:37.

Jesus did not come to establish earthly government. He came to establish truth. And He came to die for sinners. The earth was not his home. Politics were not his purpose. If we follow Jesus, politics should not be our purpose, either. But truth is. If we claim to be Christian, we must stand on the truths established by the Bible.

In a world awash in shades of gray, I miss my grandparents’ old-fashioned, black and white kitchen. I miss heaven even more. In heaven the truth is as clear as the pearly gates. Up there, there are no election lines, only elected lines.

“For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will — to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ” Ephesians 1:4-10.