Prayerful A Better Political Imagination

Dear God of Love and Justice,

We confess that our political imaginations have grown small. We have sorted your children into categories — allies and enemies, useful and expendable, worthy and unworthy — and we have called this wisdom. But you looked at a Roman centurion and saw faith. You sat at a table with tax collectors and saw hunger for something real. You washed the feet of the man who would betray you and called it love.

1 John 4:19 tells us, "We love because he first loved us." Not because they earned it. Not because they voted the right way or posted the right things. We love because you loved first — recklessly, without polling data, without calculating the political cost.

So teach us a better political imagination, Lord. When we see someone across the aisle, help us see someone across your table. When we are tempted to reduce a neighbor to a position, remind us that you knit them together in their mother's womb with the same care you gave us. Give us the holy stubbornness to insist that every zoning meeting, every school board debate, every argument at Thanksgiving dinner is happening on sacred ground — because your image-bearers are present.