Last night Barak Obama returned to Eugene to address the townsfolk at the U of O campus. He’d been there about a month ago, and we’d been amazed to see the line of people waiting to get into the basketball arena stretching clear around the entire sports area, a good city block. This time we were on campus again and decided to join the lineup and pack into the library quad for this second rally.<\/p>\n
I felt very American, going to see a presidential candidate – never done that before. In spite of (or maybe because of) my lack of experience with campaign speeches, I was struck by Obama’s sincere and personable demeanor. The people there were excited and eager to throw their support behind his ideals of change. The idea of changing how the country is run, the idea of finally solving the problems that have plagued us for decades – the idea of bringing the war to an end. These are admirable goals. Is this “change we can believe in?” If we just believe it hard enough, wave enough “HOPE” signs, will it happen?<\/p>\n
We had quite awhile to wait before the speech, packed together with lots of young Eugenians and a smaller number of middle aged ones. A youngish man sitting just in front of us had a Barak Obama campaign image sewed to his jacket. As he stood up, another patch became visible: a cross (Christ) crossed out, in the red “no-smoking” style. I guess that’s not the kind of hope this crowd is looking for. But I believe it’s the only real hope there is, the only kind that’s not just wishful thinking.<\/p>\n
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us<\/strong>, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” Romans 5:1-5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night Barak Obama returned to Eugene to address the townsfolk at the U of O campus. He’d been there …<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}