Daily Racial Reconciliation

Dear God of Love and Justice,

I confess that I have walked past tables where I was not the stranger — and never once wondered what it felt like to stand outside the door. Luke 6:20-21 tells us that You pronounce blessing on the poor, the hungry, the weeping — the very people our world steps over on its way to comfort. In the Reformed tradition, we hold that Your sovereign grace leaves no corner of creation untouched. If that is true, then racial reconciliation is not a political project — it is a theological one, rooted in the imago Dei stamped on every human face.

Forgive me for the times I have treated reconciliation as an idea to discuss rather than a wound to tend. Teach me the courage of those Mississippi church women — Black and white — who shared covered dishes across segregated tables in the 1960s, not because the laws had changed, but because You had changed their hearts first. They understood something John Calvin wrote centuries earlier: that we cannot claim to love You while despising the image You have pressed into our neighbor's skin.

Open my eyes today to the person in my own congregation, my own neighborhood, whose hunger — for dignity, for belonging, for a seat at the table — I have the power to satisfy. Make me less comfortable and more faithful. Shape me into someone who does not merely pray for justice but walks toward it with open hands.