Quiet Time: Inclusive Language for God

Dear God, who meets us in the whirlwind and in the still small voice, who thunders from Sinai and whispers in the garden,

When Jesus told us to love You with all our heart, soul, and mind, He was inviting us into a relationship so vast that no single name could contain it. You are El Shaddai, the God who nurtures and sustains. You are Jehovah Rapha, the One who heals. You are the Mother Hen who gathers her chicks beneath her wings, and the Father who runs down the road to embrace the returning child. You are the Rock, the Refiner's Fire, the Living Water.

In the Black Church, we have always known this. Our grandmothers called You "a bridge over troubled water." Our grandfathers called You "a heart-fixer and a mind-regulator." These were not theological abstractions — they were testimonies born from the belly of struggle, naming You according to how You showed up on Monday morning when the rent was due and grace arrived anyway.

Today, sit with Matthew 22:37-39 and ask yourself: when I picture God's love, whose face do I see? The command to love our neighbor as ourselves begins with an expansive love for a God who refuses to be boxed in by any single image. Every name we call upon — Comforter, Deliverer, Sustainer, Friend — reveals another facet of a love too wide for one word to hold.