Your Neighbor Voted Differently

The yard signs come down slowly. Some stay up through Thanksgiving.

By now you may know how the night went, or you may still be waiting on a count. Either way, the morning after an election has a particular quiet to it. Some people are relieved. Others are worried. A good number are just tired. Everybody remembers everybody else’s sign.

Then you go get the mail. And there’s the neighbor. The one with the other sign.

Nothing to Announce

This isn’t a post about who should have won. It’s not about which party Christians belong to, either, because I don’t think Christians belong to one. There’s plenty of room, across the political spectrum, for people who love Jesus and disagree sharply about how a country should be governed. That doesn’t mean every position is equally right, or that the consequences don’t matter. It means no political party gets to claim the Christian faith as its own. If you came looking for a verdict on the election, I don’t have one.

What I do have is a question about the next hour. What do you do with the person across the fence?

Where the Trust Goes

The psalmist has a line that sounds almost rude at election time: “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Ps. 146:3).

He doesn’t say don’t vote or don’t care. Just don’t put your weight there. Whoever is in office, they can’t carry what we sometimes ask them to carry: our security, our sense of being right, our confidence that God is on our side. It’s easy to spend months pouring hope into a campaign, until an election begins carrying more weight than it can bear. Political decisions matter, sometimes enormously. But no elected official can give us the security, righteousness, or ultimate hope that belong to Christ.

Whichever way you lean, that’s worth noticing today. If you’re celebrating, you’ve been handed something good, and it won’t last forever. If you’re grieving, you’ve lost something real, and it won’t last forever either. Paul’s way of putting it is that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), and the Christian who keeps that straight can care about public life without being owned by it.

A ballot can change who governs us. It cannot change who holds us.

A Strange Little Table

Look at the twelve men Jesus chose. One was Matthew, a tax collector, which meant he made his living collecting money for the Roman occupation, and his neighbors had reason to resent him for it. Another was Simon, whom Luke calls “the Zealot” (Luke 6:15). Scholars debate what that label meant in Jesus’ day. It may point to religious zeal more than to an organized movement against Rome, so I won’t claim more than the name suggests.

Whatever their personal convictions, Jesus called both men to follow him. A tax collector and a man called a Zealot suggest that the Twelve weren’t drawn from a single social circle. What united them wasn’t a shared political platform. It was the person who called them.

That’s not an argument that politics doesn’t matter. It’s a reminder that Jesus called people whose backgrounds and loyalties weren’t all alike. Their unity had to come from something deeper than agreement about the world around them.

Whose Neighbor?

A lawyer once asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” It was a real question and also a way to shrink the commandment to something manageable (Luke 10:25-29). Jesus answered with a story about a Samaritan, a man the lawyer’s people despised, who stopped for a wounded stranger. Then Jesus turned the question around. Which of these three proved to be a neighbor? “The one who showed him mercy,” the lawyer answers. He doesn’t even use the word Samaritan. And Jesus tells him, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:36-37).

Notice what Jesus does. He doesn’t ask who the lawyer agrees with. He asks who acted like a neighbor.

So the question after an election isn’t how do I get the people who voted wrong to see sense? It’s closer to who needs a neighbor today, and what’s keeping me from being one? The person with the other sign might be the one whose mother is sick, whose job is shaky, who is scared about what happens next. People on both sides are scared right now. They’re just scared of different things.

So Far as It Depends on You

Paul’s counsel is unusually practical. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:17-18).

If possible. He knows it won’t always be. So far as it depends on you. He knows you only control your half.

Paul asks Christians to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). He’s speaking to the church, where people are bound together by something deeper than their differences. But that same humility and gentleness should shape how we treat people beyond the church, too. Unity isn’t uniformity, and it isn’t silence. It means refusing to reduce a person to a box they checked, even when you believe that choice was deeply wrong.

Jesus goes further than most of us would like: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). If that’s the standard for people who are actually against us, it surely covers the neighbor who just disagrees with us at the ballot box.

Love doesn’t suspend judgment, though. Sometimes loving your neighbor means standing beside them against something unjust. Sometimes it means telling them they’re wrong. What it never means is deciding they’re no longer worthy of your love. And if someone has treated you with cruelty or contempt, loving them doesn’t mean you have to make yourself vulnerable to more of it.

Praying for Both

Here’s a practice that will get under your skin if you try it. Pray by name for the people in office. All of them, including the ones you voted against.

Paul tells Timothy to pray “for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:1-2). The people he meant were not obviously friendly to Christians. Jeremiah told exiles in Babylon, of all places, to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you… and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer. 29:7).

Praying for a leader can mean asking God to give them wisdom. It can also mean asking God to restrain what is harmful, correct what is unjust, and turn their decisions toward the good of the people they serve. You don’t have to pretend you agree, and you don’t have to stop working to change what you think is wrong. But you may find it very hard to hate someone you’ve been praying for.

When People Are the Ballot Measure

One more thing, said gently.

For some of your neighbors, an election isn’t an argument about policy. It’s a vote on whether their marriage is recognized, whether their job is protected, whether their children are safe at school, whether they get to stay in the country. They’re not a topic. They’re people, and they spent the last few months listening to strangers debate whether they should have what everyone else already has.

Loving your neighbor doesn’t mean pretending those consequences are small, or asking the people who bear them to act as though nothing happened.

If you’re one of them, I hope someone is checking on you today. If you’re not, I’d ask you to be that someone, whichever way you voted. A text. A coffee. “How are you doing?” Not a defense of your ballot, not a lecture about theirs.

The neighbor you’re least inclined to call may be the one who most needs it.

The Mail Is Waiting

So go get the mail. Say hello to the neighbor. Don’t open with the election. If they bring it up, listen longer than feels necessary, and don’t hurry to win.

You won’t fix the country at the mailbox. But Christ has put you on this street for a reason, and it isn’t to keep score.

The election is over. Your neighbor is still your neighbor.