muck, manifestos and middle england.

So today is election day, which we’ve all been waiting eagerly for for about a decade… or not, as the case may be and I’m sure half the blogging world will be posting on the subject. I particularly liked the Vernacular Curates rant on party signs here .
Round our way, good old middle England will be out in force, swayed by their city friends or whether it will affect little Johnnies school fees… I am not sure that our current MP will ever leave office, until he chokes on his room temperature bourbon in his cut crystal glass. (I don’t mean that to sound quite as bitter as it seems to have come out, just that he has been there so long that his seat in Parliament has the shape of his derriere very firmly imprinted upon it…).

But isn’t it funny how we are all happy to disucss quite personal issues with our friends, but when it comes down to politics no one wants to tell anyone else who they have voted for. As if it matters? I don’t think my neighbour is going to cut me off because I voted Lib Dem. yeah, ok so I did, I voted Lib Dem – you all know now and does it make you think about me differently? No, I doubt it, because actually you could probably have a fairly good stab guessing at who most people vote for anyway. Today I voted on the way to school with the kids and half of the school were in there doing the same thing, it was like some kind of coffee morning – kind of nice I thought, except that you could just tell that everyone was burning to know who everyone else was going to vote for, but not daring to voice the question. Even as we left and my 6 year old said to me, ‘Mum who did you vote for?’, I made sure I was well out of ear shot of the village hall before revealing my guilty secret, and I have no idea why!

And in a funny way it’s a bit like Faith. Most of us are not happy to stand up in a group of people whose beliefs we don’t know and say ‘this is what I believe’ (Vicars excepted!). Why is that? If you have given your life wholeheartedly to Jesus then why keep it to yourself? Because you’re afraid of what they will say, what they will think of you, of what judgements they will make on what you chose to believe. Just like which political party we chose to vote for, what does that say about us to people we know? What judgements will they draw from that?

I actually think that for the majority of people, they decide sometime around the age of 26 1/2 who they are going to vote for and then they stick to it for life. I mean how many of us actually know what the manifestos are for the main parties, how many of us have listened to all the debates, read the copious amounts of commentaries and made an informed decision as to how we are going to vote? be honest now…. Again I feel a bit like that about my faith at the moment. I know who I am voting for, but I am reading all the manifestos, challenging why I am voting that way and making a more informed decision. I will undoubtedly vote the same way at the end of this process but I will be more convicted in that choice and better able to understand why I am doing it.

Happy Voting all… :)