Morning Meditation: Social Media and Community

Dear God of radical welcome,

Leviticus 19:34 commands, "The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." This morning, before the coffee cools, before the notifications pile up, let that ancient word settle into the place where your thumbs meet the screen.

The Anabaptist communities of sixteenth-century Europe knew what it meant to be strangers — hunted across borders, dependent on the mercy of people who didn't share their language or their faith. They learned that every stranger carries the imago Dei, the image of God, and that hospitality is never optional for the people of Jesus.

Now consider your feed. A refugee mother in Beirut posts a photo of her children eating their first hot meal in weeks. A neighbor you've never spoken to shares that he lost his job. A teenager from a town you'll never visit writes three words: "I feel invisible." Each one is the foreigner at your gate.