This post has nothing to do with Internet Marketing, and yet it has everything to do with it, too.

Churches close on Election Day. Who would have thought they would?

My mom suggested a few weeks back that I stop in a church to light a candle and say a prayer. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a church, but I felt a lot like lighting that candle tonight. So, I set out in the drizzle and walked a block down the street to a darkened church. I climbed the steps and tried the knob. It didn’t turn.

There’s another church a couple of blocks back in the other direction, so I turned about, and hopefully retraced my steps through the rain. As I got close, I noticed a sign telling me that this church was also closed on Election Day. I walked up and tried the door anyway, but it was locked.

I decided that I would try to light that candle in the morning, and turned around again, to head back home.

Maybe the churches don’t want to seem to be involved in earthly elections. Maybe they thought that many would-be preoccupied with deciding who would be elected to guide the country on this Election Day. I wish I could have said my prayers surrounded by the solace of a church, but I’ll try to take some quiet moments at home to say them.

I wonder about spirituality in the workplace. I wonder about doors that should be opened but are locked instead when they are needed. It’s not something that I usually write about here, but it is something that I think about, and something that I’ve been thinking about very much recently.

Work should be a place where you do something that you care about deeply, where you can make a difference in the world, or where you can develop the tools to make that difference.

Work should be a place where you can help empower others to make positive changes to this earth that we share.

How often do we think about the struggles of others when we decide to work with a client, or when we decide how we will promote a business or organization, or interact with people who are new to our industry?

We need to be lighting candles, we need to be concerned about the welfare of others whom we share our livelihoods and lives with, we need to make sure that doors aren’t locked when they should be open.

There’s more to this story, and I’ll be writing about it over the days and weeks to come, and I’ll mix in some posts about patents and search engines, but I’ll be coming back to it. As an industry and as individuals, members of the search marketing community need to consider some change (and I’m not excluding myself from that statement).