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It's election eve. When I look at the polls, I'm still more anxious than most Obama supporters I know. But I also can't deny the slow-rising surge of hope I feel, that a new day is about to dawn in our country. It holds so much possibility for starting over and getting it right.

I have always loved new beginnings. January 1, the first day of school, a new friendship or job—even each new week gives me that overly-sentimental, inspirational-poster sense of possibility. <strong><em>I can figure out how I screwed it up before, set it all that mess aside, and get it right this time</em></strong><em><strong>.</strong> </em>

When I was growing up, one of our family's New Year's Eve rituals, in addition to a raucous game of charades, involved taking scraps of paper and privately writing down all of our regrets and perceived flaws—anything we wanted to let go of. Then we individually threw them into the roaring fire. As an overly-romantic child steeped in classic literature, I loved the symbolic, poetic beauty of watching all that was wrong go up in flames. Gone. <em>Good riddance.</em>

We all know what happens shortly into the new year, though. We slip up, fall into old habits, make the same mistakes, and generally begin feeling disgusted by our inability to follow through with our resolve to change.

So while the idea of "each new day offering a new beginning" is certainly as beautiful as a sunrise, it's also easy for me to quickly twist it into an ugly down-on-Kristin-storm. I start kicking myself, asking <em>What's it going to take for you to learn? When are you going to get it right? How many chances to start over do you need?</em>
<h3>The bigger the do-over, the higher the expectations</h3>
When the second chance is a big one, like a second marriage, the stakes are really high. I'm pretty sure that's why I never thought I'd get married again: I didn't have enough faith in the institution of marriage, or in myself, to get it right. And the thought of getting it wrong again was simply too painful to bear.

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Then I met Jason (and if you don't know that story you can <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=6">read about it here</a>). Suddenly I could imagine a new beginning—not one of perfection, but one of partnership and effort, forgiveness and grace. This sense of possibility was so strong in us, that we chose this verse, II Corinthians 5:17, for our invitations and wedding text: "So if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"

<strong>The new creation, we realized, wasn't one that involved somehow throwing all of our past hurts and flaws and wrongs into a fire and walking away together, shiny and perfect and new. We were redeemed in a different way, one that allowed us to carry all those slips of paper around in our pockets, into our new marriage.</strong>

We were very aware of who we were and where we had been, but we were able to handle that history in new, healthy ways—to look at each piece of our pasts openly and honestly, and to deal with them together, in this new context.

This perspective is critical, because there's no way we're going to wake up every day and just magically get it right (even though we're an amazing match for each other and we both learned a lot in our first marriages). <em>That's</em> what a new creation looks like—working to redeem and slowly perfect the old, not turning it to ash each time you mess up, and starting over.
<h3>The leap from love to politics: our past is messy</h3>
Maybe this seems like a stretch, but this is what I'm thinking about today: I'm thinking that I put a lot of hope into a new marriage, and it's hard not to get really down on myself when I fall into old ways of being and communicating. I've also put a lot of hope into Obama being elected tomorrow. If he wins, I worry that we'll expect too much from an Obama administration. If, for some reason, McCain wins, I fear I will slip into a spiral of despair. Certainly, I'd rather deal with the first worry, but either way, the stakes seem high.

The reality is, I carry those metaphoric slips of my past around with me, and it's up to me to decide how to deal with them each day. Our country has a messy past, too, that it will have to lug along like so much old baggage, no matter who is elected president.

<strong>The hope that we have, in other words, isn't anchored in a big new beginning that's marked by a wedding day or election day or New Year. It is in the hundreds of miniscule new beginnings that happen each day in each of us, because of God's redemptive work in us.</strong>

I think my mother, Joi Tennant, expressed perfectly what I want to say in this segment of a comment she left on my recent post about faith and politics, <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=109">Do the right thing</a>:

<em>Is God voting for McCain or Obama by pressing his will into our minds, thus changing the course of history? Highly unlikely! If it were so, the world would already look a whole lot better than it does today. But Christians do believe that God is in the business of changing us — how we react and interact with each other. No matter who is elected, what happens in this world depends on how each of us behaves the day after the voting is over.</em>

And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. So let it be.