But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah 29:7 (NRSVUe)

Today is Election Day, and hopefully your voice was heard through your vote.

We don’t endorse political candidates at Pilgrim Church. That’s not our area of interest or expertise. But most of us have convictions that are informed by our faith. As whole people of God, we take our values and our vision for our lives together everywhere we go. And that includes the voting booth.

On the other hand, we don’t all feel the same way about everything. In some ways, we represent the truth of the United States in 2026. But we also represent something else: the willingness to love and to embrace one another regardless of our choices on Election Days.

The Jeremiah scripture above reminds us to pray for our places, wherever they are and however we got there.

Whether you feel like you’re “part of the mainstream” in your local part of the USA, or whether you feel like you’re one in thousands, we are all part of the great experiment represented in the democracy of the United States. Is everything perfect, all the time? Well, if half this nation is happy, the other half is probably dissatisfied, in one measure or another. But still, we are together in all of it.

I hope you voted, either early or today, and I hope you feel a part of something larger. I know it can be disheartening when folks you didn’t vote for are doing things you wouldn’t choose. But we are still in this together, and we need constructive, critical voices to help us meet the needs and challenges of our changing world. Pray for the United States today, and be part of whatever future we can craft together by showing up to have your vote counted.

If you need words for your prayer, you could do a lot worse than these words from the second verse of our hymn, “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies” in our Pilgrim Hymnal:

O Beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern impassioned stress/A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flaw,/Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law.