"Madi.

It's happened.

President Trump."

These are the three texts I woke up to at 2am on Wednesday, November 9. The night before I had gone to bed around 10pm, nervous about the results of the election but still confident that Hillary Clinton would be our 45th president and the very first female to be so.

But early the next morning, everything I assumed, believed and trusted to be true was absolutely wrong. It was shocking. After reading those three texts, I felt broken. Defeated. Confused. I fell asleep only to dream that it was all a huge joke. I thought I would wake up to a follow-up text saying "just kidding! as if that would ever happen."

I guess I should have saw it coming. Maybe we all should have. I guess I never understood how a man who has instilled so much fear and brought so much pain to so many people would actually be elected president. But he was - Donald Trump is our President-Elect.

I decided to run at the gym rather than outside that morning; I needed to watch the news, to understand what happened, to see how we got here.

I shed my first tear right there on the treadmill. My heart ached and my spirit was sorrowful. As I thought of my friends of color, my LGBTQ peers and the immigrants and refugees who live in my neighborhood, I wondered how a man who devalued the personhood of everyone who doesn't look just like him could be the new leader of our country.

Because of this, I am mourning. People are scared, hurting, anxious, upset, and all rightfully so. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but as a woman I am terrified that a man whose rhetoric about me is objectifying, degrading and sexually aggressive will now stand up as one of the most powerful persons in the world. What precedent will this set for a country in which one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives.

This week I cried a lot. In class, in our school chapel, in the car, in my room and even right here in the library. I cried for those who are scared, who are hurting, who already feel as if their lives don't matter.

As Christians, we must not stand for this. We must mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep. We must suffer alongside those suffering. We must stand with the marginalized.

And I must listen. As a white, educated and upper-middle class woman, my context for this pain is limited. So I must listen to those around me who are fearing for their lives, for their well-being, for their opportunities.

Right now, I mourn. I can't do anything else. The Lord tells us to cry out to Him with our fears, our desperations, our concerns. So I do. I trust Him, even in the midst of my mourning, and know that He is King and Ruler and Redeemer.

But for now, I just mourn.