Evening Prayer: We Have What We Need to Practice Love

Lord, I come to You this evening with hands that held a coffee cup all day but never once reached across the distance between me and the person who needed them most.

Leviticus 19:34 says it plainly: love the stranger as yourself, because you were once strangers in Egypt. Not "tolerate the stranger." Not "be polite to the stranger from a safe distance." Love them — with the same fierce tenderness You showed a nation of runaway slaves stumbling through the desert with nothing but Your promise and a pillar of fire.

I already have what I need to practice this love. I have a kitchen table with an empty chair. I have a language called kindness that requires no translation. I have two feet that can walk next door to the family whose accent marks them as foreign in this neighborhood, and I have a voice that can say the most revolutionary sentence in any language: "You belong here."

Forgive me for the days I've treated love like a scarce resource — rationed, calculated, dispensed only to those who look and sound and worship like me. Your love was never scarce. It fed five thousand with a boy's lunch and still filled twelve baskets with the leftovers.