I miss him already. I miss Barack Obama holding hands with his daughters on the White House portico. I miss his embrace of Michelle backstage before taking the podium. I miss the size 12 shiny Florsheims sticking out from his desk in the Oval Office, and I miss his lank frame hiking up the stairs to Air Force One, solitary and face forward, on a predawn mission somewhere.

I will miss having a normal human in the White House. A family man. And our first African-American president. In this country and this trending-medieval century, it is a ­wonder he made it to the White House at all, a feat he survived two terms. Soon we will have a new president rattling all the dishes in his place.

I don’t know about you, but for me eight years is a long time ago. I was nearly a decade younger! I had more organs (seriously, but don’t ask), had two children at home in school and two in college. Now three have their own mailing addresses, two are married, and my youngest is about to graduate from college. I want to give Obama credit: I got to pack school lunches, plan weddings and other celebrations, tend sick people and their funerals, earn money, and buy groceries apart from the Secret Service and a bajillion underlings, while he sat through countless briefings and performances, signed off on declarations to hold Father’s Day and agreements to keep the government running, gave the split-second order to kill Osama bin Laden and made other hard decisions, hugged the troops and their widows, and took everything a polyglot nation like the United States could throw his way.

Where would we be if our 44th president had matched a conciliatory demeanor with the ­language and acts of ­meaningful reconciliation?

Thank you, Mr. President. The country is not dead, and only God and history know all you have done to preserve it.

But past is prologue. George W. Bush in many ways begot the Obama administration, a pro-war cowboy giving way to an anti-war community organizer. It is the same for Obama and what comes after him. The calm demeanor too often spoke in divisive language, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and black against white, sending the U.S. attorney general in where the police chief or the governor should do. Injustices on his watch have grown, at home and abroad, and the public has seethed. The country has been stirred on matters of race and poverty needing our attention. But cultural “progress” has come at the expense of civic order and civil discourse. The language of rights has overtaken the call to service.

Where would we be if our 44th president had matched a conciliatory demeanor with the language and acts of meaningful reconciliation? Not bathed the White House in rainbow lights on the eve of Obergefell v. Hodges? Not blessed a wave of unaccompanied minors at the border? Not golfed on Martha’s Vineyard moments after talking to the parents of beheaded ­journalist James Foley?

The passive-aggressive nature of much of the Obama presidency matches the tenor of our times, where internet trolls replace the hard work of a loyal opposition, where every American has an opinion but few have staked their lives or even livelihoods on it. Or is it the other way around, the tenor of our times reflecting an aloof Obama era where mischief grew on his watch (that Clinton server), indecision came dressed decidedly (the failed Syria red line), and avid promises never came to be (affordable healthcare)?

Perspective is everything, I am learning. A repugnant Election 2016 has made me long for earlier election seasons, peopled with larger men and women who were worth my energy to agree with or not. Oh, to debate again whether a Mormon should be president.

The season of national transition we are entering is a proper one for reflection, for ­conviction over the ways faith-based political action has come unglued, for reconsidering how Christians contend with their enemies at the gate. We are all weak men seeing dimly, but we have a strong God standing athwart past, present, and future.