IN THEORY, La Canada Valley Sun, January 29, 2009
Topic:
Now that Barack Obama has been sworn in as president of the United States, if you had the chance to have lunch with the him, what advice would you offer him as he enters the presidency?
Our response:
The installation of President Obama brings with it great expectation, not only from citizens of the United States, but from people around the world. And as is typical of a new president, he is already very much at work.
In terms of offering advice, we all have our individual thoughts on how the new president should carry out his duties. But human advice tends to be flawed, as indeed is the use of any purely human rationale in determining policies for a new government.
My hope is that the new president be guided rightly in his decision making. The nineteenth-century founder of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote that, “The revered President and Congress of our favored land are in God’s hands.” She saw a connection between God and man whereby man in his highest sense expresses the qualities of God. That is true government. And the Bible provides guidance that helps us to experience that connection increasingly as we adhere to the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and to the edict of Christ Jesus,“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
We don’t have to wait for an invitation to lunch at the White House. We can each do our part in prayerfully knowing that the leadership of our country is rightly guided by God, and that no inferior motive or foreign interference can prevent the realization of a better world based on the unbreakable relationship between God and man.
This will help to promote increasingly progressive leadership by our new president and his team. It’s also one of ways we can individually participate in our democracy.
