Contemplating We Have What We Need to Practice Love

Peter had every reason to stay home that day. He was a devout Jew, a leader in the young church, and Cornelius was a Roman centurion — the uniform of the empire that had crucified his Rabbi. But God sent a vision of a sheet lowered from heaven, filled with animals Peter had been taught his whole life never to touch. Three times the voice came: "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." And so Peter walked through a door he never expected to open — into a Gentile household, where the Holy Spirit was already at work before he arrived.

That is the revolution of Acts 10:34-35. God does not show favoritism. The love we are called to practice is not something we must manufacture from scratch. It is already present, already moving, in places and among people we have been conditioned to overlook.

We have what we need to practice love because the Spirit goes ahead of us. The question is whether we will follow. Will we sit at the table we were taught to avoid? Will we listen to the story we assumed had nothing to teach us?

A prayer for the journey: Lord, give me Peter's courage — not the courage of certainty, but the courage of obedience when everything I thought I knew is being remade. Open my eyes to the places where Your Spirit is already working, especially among the people I have been slowest to see. Teach me that Your love has never respected the boundaries I have drawn around it. In the name of Christ, who ate with sinners and called it the Kingdom, Amen.