I am in turmoil over the recent election. I feel like I've been stabbed in the gut and the wound is gushing uncontrollably. I'm grieved that my fellow Christians throughout America voted for the man who's going to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act. It is very difficult for me to come to terms with the reality that so many Christians throughout America rejoiced when the future signer of FOCA won and will be leading our country. It literally makes me sick to my stomach to think about it, but I obviously have dear friends and loved ones that voted for him.

I want to weep. I am weighed down by the reality that some of my closest and dearest friends see this issue so completely differently than me. I feel like a wedge has been inexorably smashed through the intimacy I feel with them. I do not have many intimates in my life, and the few people that I open up most fully with are those with whom I feel a shared fundamental view of the world. For me, that fundamental view stems from the belief that all of us share the image of God, that there is no greater or more awesome part of the universe than our fellow neighbor and that the call to treat our neighbor as ourselves stems from this most fundamental view of who our neighbor is. We share this in common: God knew us before we were born, and every child is knit in his or her mother's womb. And in that womb is something miraculous that begins at the very moment of conception. It is sacred and eternal and is the most precious thing in the universe. All that is good about us, all that is noble about us, all that calls us to seek after God stems from the very image of God in all of us. I thought I shared this same strength of feeling with all of those who I am most intimate with, and it is a shock to my psyche that I don't. It has rocked my emotions and my intellect and I'm still reeling from it.

This is all very recent and still very raw, but I need time to process all of this, and that probably means I won't be spending much time with some of my dearest friends until I do. This may sound all high and mighty, but that doesn't matter to me. The bottom line is that I need to grapple with what it means for me to know and understand that some of my dearest and closest intimates don't share this same view as I do, or as strongly as I do, or in the same way that I expected them to. I am slowly becoming aware that, whether I like or not, it has a very real bearing on the depth of my friendship with them. And this is not a conscious choice--it is an automatic reaction that is happening within me, and I don't like it, but I need to process it and figure out what the hell is going on within me.