I’ve been pretty good with prayer for most of my life. I’ll admit that I hadn’t really focused on the adulation part of “Adulation, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication” until recent years, but I pretty much prayed every day.

That changed in the last few months. I don’t know why, but I think it had something to do with feeling guilty about my sin and not feeling worthy to go before God until the sting of my sin was dulled. I know that doesn’t make sense, since God doesn’t forget about what I’ve done because I waited to talk to him, but knowledge doesn’t always affect emotions and feelings the way it should. So, my prayer life had been kind of dwindling until the past couple of days.

This morning, after I finished praying, I was thinking about what was different this week that I felt more of a desire to and more at ease with praying. Then it hit me and I had to smile.

Since our church has been without a preacher, we’ve had different speakers every week. Last week, John Turner gave a sermon on prayer. This Sunday, we talked about prayer in Kevin Ziegler’s Bible class. Then that morning, Tim Ault gave a sermon on appreciation that largely focused on prayer.

I’m not one to think that events take place solely for me. Meaning, I don’t think God had all three of those lessons happen just to get my prayer life back on track. But I am really grateful that prayer was the focus for those three lessons. Hearing it so often made me aware of what I had been missing out on.

I just thought I would share this experience to encourage you to not let your prayer life dwindle and keep your eyes open for the ways God is affecting your life.

Glenn Greenwald:

As the Bush administration comes to a close… Just consider – with no hyperbole – what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons – “black site” gulags – beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they’d be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of “war crimes".

Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward – something that was never supposed to happen – spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that’s to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense. And on and on and on.

I did not vote for Obama nor did I vote for McCain because I strongly disagree with the policies of both. Be that as it may, I’ll tell you one thing that Obama gives me that McCain wouldn’t: hope.

I’m not talking about hope that Obama will suddenly fix all of our nations problems or hope that he will change our economy, education, and health care for the better. I’m talking about hope that he will undo some of the things mentioned above by Greenwald. Some of them are changes that Obama can begin to enact as soon as he takes office. Shut down the secret prisons. End spying on and detention of our own citizens. Create iron-clad policy against the usage of torture. Begin to restore a level of trust in the office of President of the United States of America.

It may be unlikely that President Obama will fulfill these hopes, but they stand a much better chance under Obama than they would under McCain.

UPDATE

This is a good sign (emphasis added):

President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison …

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been “theoretical” before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.

“I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else,” Tribe said. “We can’t put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there.“

Today’s xkcd:

After two years of presidential politics, Election Day is finally here. The rest of the week will be full of reflection on how the next President won this election and what was working against the other candidate. After that, speculation of what government with this new President will be like.

But what about next month? It’s hard to remember what life was like before there were candidates vying for the presidency. In the beginning, we counted how many times Giuliani said “9/11″ in each of his speeches and joked about Kucinich being abducted by aliens. More recently, we watched for the latest flippant remark from Biden or uninformed response from Palin. What will fill our news in the coming months?

Molly and I voted this morning. If you would have been in our car as we headed off to work, I think you would have heard an audible sigh from both of us as we realized that it was all coming to an end. No more debates. No more smear advertisements. No more 4″x6″ glossy mailings.

It’s almost over.