The word that carries both results is a small one: first. Deb Haaland's win in New Mexico and Peggy Flanagan's win in Minnesota are genuine reasons to celebrate — and yet the label first quietly testifies to how many elections came and went before Tuesday night with the door closed. The joy and the long wait arrive together, and it is dishonest to celebrate one while pretending the other never happened.
The psalmist understood that order of operations. The verse does not say the night was short, or mild, or manageable. It says weeping lasts through the night — the full night, no shortcuts — and only then does joy come with the morning. That is a more honest grammar of hope than the sentimental kind. Hope is not the claim that waiting was never painful. It is the conviction that waiting is not the final word, and that morning is a real event with a real hour attached, not a metaphor we use to comfort ourselves.
Tuesday's results are such a morning in a specific, visible form: names printed on ballots, votes counted through the ordinary machinery of democracy, two offices that generations of Native American women never had the chance to hold. That matters, and one honest limit belongs alongside it. A historic win in one election does not resolve the broader challenges Native communities still face, and the verse never promises that every long night ends the way we hope. A morning is a beginning, not a completion.
Still, there is a practice hidden in the psalm worth borrowing this week: let a genuine joy have its full moment. When something we or people we love waited a long time for finally arrives, we often rush past the gratitude toward the next problem. Sit in this one. Name it, thank God for it, and let it rebuild our expectation that other long nights, in other lives, also have a morning on the other side.