The Directive Has Not Expired
The Directive Has Not Expired
The Premonition & the Divine Directive That Has Held Me Since 2016
On an absolutely world shattering day in November 2016, while Hillary was still decisively in the lead in the vote count, I had the sinking dread of premonition while driving home from Bible study. I somehow knew that Trump would win the 2016 election, even though in my naive worldview there was no conceivable way that he actually would.
That day I had quietly and proudly cast my vote for gender equality, for LGBTQ rights, for rationality, for reproductive freedom, for my opinion of the best chance we had at rightness and goodness, and for the United States of America to be led by a woman for the first time in its long patriarchal existence.
I have been living with these premonitions for a long while, most of my adult life in fact. The divine whisper comes to me, settles over my body, and tells me things I should not yet know. It asks me to believe, to adjust, to live in faith, and to move as though what it reveals is a certainty rather than a possibility.
The divine voice has spoken about the entirety of the facets of my life. There is scarcely a space it hasn’t touched Again and again it arrives unbidden with exquisite softness, tells me in the utmost love what will happen, it offers me guidance on how to handle it, and then it leaves as softly and quietly as it arrived.
One would think that I would enjoy these experiences, but I do not. On the contrary, they leave me shaken to my core. I fight with them the moment they arrive, either willing the new truth into existence begging it to come to pass the way they say it will, or doubting my memory, it’s veracity, my ability to hear it well. The cause me suffering, for I have not yet learned to hold the premonition with finesse.
That day driving home from Bible study, while the world assumed she would win, I knew of a different outcome, and I begged and pleaded with whatever brought it to me. “Please no. Please, please no.”
This delivering force of premonition did more than just deliver this heart wrenching news of defeat. It also gave me a directive. It told me to be strong. To remain anchored in love, to be present with one another, and to love the marginalized like my life depended on it. To hold human decency, not my own ego, as a gauge for rightness. As my preeminent ethos. To hold human beings as they are meant to be held, accountable in the way of the Christ crashing tables in the temple, offering scathing rebukes to those who use power to oppress, and inviting all the children to come to him, holding them up as the moral exemplar, and our top priority.
Is there pain involved? Let me do my best to alleviate it. Is there fear involved? Let me do my best to soothe it. How does this impact the children, our most marginalized community, and our gravest responsibility? We must hold the children in highest regard. When the children hurt, we all hurt. The children, every single child, belongs most deeply to every single one of us. This was the energy I was to embody.
That night I watched in horror through eyes blurred with tears as the premonition became dreadfully fulfilled and the next morning I woke up on a timeline that I was terrified to endure.
What would become of us now? I thought. What must I do to remain strong and anchored in love?
I existed on edge from 2016-2020, waiting for the ax to fall. And it fell, but not in the ways that the premonition seemed to convey it would. Sure it was bad, but the premonition felt catastrophic. And when we skated into 2020 under new leadership, I assumed (naively) that we had dodged the bullet of the fullness of catastrophe.
Then 2024 entered the chat. Trump campaigned again. The premonition whispered to me in the back of my mind, and I begged for the second time. “Please no, not again.”
The pleading was to no avail. I watched him win again, beating the rational, reasonable, ethical female choice. An imperfect option to be sure, but she had merit in spades over him.
I knew that the directive of prioritizing peace, of standing with the marginalized, of caring for the children, of embodying strength was not just a first-term directive.
In a years time in Trump’s second term as the President of the United States, we have watched our country be led from a fragile spineless democracy and into unchallenged facism. We’ve watched hatred become emboldened and brave enough to show it’s face. We’ve watch reason depart from the conversation and our government leaders become Orwellian, overtly encouraging us to deny the evidence of our five senses. “You saw a murder?? Oh no that was self-defense.” “You see a human? Oh no that is a monster.” “You see evil? Oh no, this is care. Responsible care from your elected officials. You’re simply confused.”
The directive has not expired.
The directive is for as long as racism and terror go unchallenged in our country. It’s for as long as children can be exploited and used as pawns in the games of power hungry evil men. It’s for as long as we watch government sanctioned murder take place in the streets of America. It’s for as long as we rip family’s apart sending them to cages, then to countries they don’t even belong to.
The directive is for today and tomorrow and the next.
An indefinite directive offered by the softness of universal flow, without an expiration date, and applicable to Trump, an evil dictator who has inadvertently shown us the truth of our collective shadow finally come to light. But also evil as such. The parts of ourselves that quietly harbor the type of evil coming to the surface of our collective awareness, a mirror for our individual awareness.
Perhaps this is your directive too. Maybe you didn’t even need a premonition to know this is who you are in this hour of our greatest need.
Let us stand together against the onslaught of darkness. Let us muster our courage to speak, to hope, and mostly to love. The time is now, the directive unending.
