The Importance of Voting...

Anyone who knows me, knows I'm a news junkie. It's an addiction that I've been working on curbing. Not that I feel responsible for the lack of knowledge the general public (and people in my generation specifically) have on current events, but I just can't help it. I may struggle with the conviction, when sometimes, when I can't sleep in the middle of the night (it happens weekly in this pregnancy), I'm just as quick to start reading the current world events as I am to pray or read my Bible (not my favorite on the phone, but I'm always scared of sitting up and turning on the light for fear it will wake me up further).

Besides it technically being the law (and my husband will tell you, I'm also a law-abiding citizen), we had no real reason to change our registrations and licenses over to NC, since we were only here a year, as everything would have still been valid. But... this year is an election year. And a big one. And it turns out that the senate race in NC may just well be the most expensive in history, with over $100million spent, and over 100,000 tv ads (PTL I don't have a tv...).

So... guess who registered to vote? :)

And as is custom, Liam wanted to know what we were going to do tomorrow. So I mentioned taking them with me to vote. And he wanted to know what voting was.

And thus began what I considered Government 101.

And my husband smirked and said I'm brainwashing early. ;)

I told him voting is something special that people in America get to do to choose who is our leaders in government. And he wanted to know what government was. That's a bit harder. So I said, well, do you remember who Pontius Pilate was? And he replied in the affirmative. And so I asked him whether he liked Pilate, to which he replied no, for the obvious reason of allowing Jesus to be beaten and crucified. I asked him whether he would want Pilate to be in charge of him. That was a no brainer.

So I told him Pilate was the government. The government decides what we can do and not do. And some people, like the Jews, were not able to decide whether or not they wanted Pilate. But in America, our blessing is we get to choose our government. But there are good candidates and bad candidates. So we study which ones are good (I may or may not have spent 2 hours doing this late one night), and go vote for them. He wanted to know how candidates were bad... oh my. He opened up a can of worms with that one ;)  Haha.

I told him that some candidates want babies that are still in their mommy's bellies not to live... to which my son said that was wrong and murder.

And I said and some people, see that you work real hard to make money, and want to take away more of your money... to which he replied that that was stealing.

And I said that depending upon who gets elected, some people may not want us worshipping God any way we want, anytime we want, nor would they want us praying out loud in front of other people and obeying what God tells us to do; and some may not want us telling others about Jesus and how much he loves them.... and he said well, we always need to obey God, and I better go vote in the good candidates.

My thoughts exactly. ;)

So there may have been a little indoctrination there, or specific wording to help my 5-year old understand.... but he got it.

Do you??