From news editor Daniel Silliman: One of the things you do in a democracy is live and work side by side with people you disagree with. Where I am in East Tennessee, the presidential election was not close. And yet 3 out of 10 people in this little valley are mourning the results while the other 7 are celebrating. Christians should probably be especially good at living peaceably with everyone (Rom. 12:18), but we seem to struggle with it too.

I wonder how the pastor of my church did it back in the 1890s. He ran for governor of Tennessee and lost—by a lot. In fact, he got about the same number of votes across the entire state as the second-place candidate got in just this area.

And a few days after that election, the local paper exulted that the results were good enough “to make a cast iron dog wag its tail.”

That pastor had to come home and minister in a community that had actually celebrated his defeat. I wonder how he managed. We have a few things that he wrote in the church archives, but he doesn’t say anything about this except to note that after his loss, he went back to work. Maybe that’s all you can do, though. Win or lose, electoral victory or defeat, there’s work to do. And the faithful go back to doing it.