Contemplating Nonviolent Resistance

Dear God of Justice and Mercy,

On a sweltering August afternoon in 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer stood before a crowd in Mississippi with welts still fresh on her back from a jailhouse beating. She had tried to register to vote. For that crime, she was fired from her job, shot at in her home, and brutalized by police. Yet when reporters asked if she hated the men who beat her, she said, "It wouldn't solve any problems for me to hate." She chose instead to sing — This Little Light of Mine — until her voice shook the rafters of every church that would have her.

Lord, when the prophet Amos thundered, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he was not describing a gentle brook. He was describing a force that reshapes the landscape — persistent, unstoppable, carving new channels through stone. Nonviolent resistance is that kind of water. It does not destroy what stands in its path; it wears it down with relentless, holy patience.

Teach us, O God, that courage does not always carry a sword. Sometimes it carries a hymnal. Sometimes it sits at a lunch counter. Sometimes it simply refuses to move from a bus seat. Give us the faith of those who believed that love, stubbornly applied, could crack open systems that violence never could.