Piloting Faith: Stay Awake

A Word for the Day...

In the Christian tradition, there’s a story of Jesus during his last days going to a place called Gethsemane to pray. He takes a few of his closest disciples and asks them to keep watch throughout the night while he spends time alone, preparing himself what he knows will be difficult days ahead.

He spends many hours in prayer, feeling the anguish and pain of what he feared was ahead for himself, his followers, and his movement. When he was finished, he went to rejoin his disciples and discovered that they had fallen asleep sometime during the night, failing to keep watch. It was a heartbreaking moment for him, and in frustration, he said to them, “Could you not stay awake for one hour? Could you not do this one thing for me?”

In these long days in the fight for justice, we’re at the point where some of us want to fall asleep. Some of us, especially those of us with white skin, wish the protests, the challenging conversations, the “seeing in color” that we’ve poured ourselves into these past couple of weeks would now justify a return to life as we knew it. We are ready to fall back asleep.

This is why people of color say over and over to people just joining this work, "Stay woke." We tend to show up for the moment but abandon the movement. The kind of change we dream of - equality and justice for all - won't happen after a few days of protest or sadly even many years of struggle. The fight we have been called to is transformational - one that demands we change the way we live. Until then, we must stay woke.

I know we are all weary. I feel it too. But I also know that we must keep pushing, keep showing up, keep speaking out, especially in our fatigue. The long arc of the moral universe is bending, but we must keep pushing toward justice.

We are in this together,

Rev. Cameron Trimble
Author of 60 Days of Faith: A Devotional

Prayer for the Week

Grant us, Lord God, a vision of your world as your love would have it:
a world where the weak are protected, and none go hungry or poor;
a world where the riches of creation are shared, and everyone can enjoy them;
a world where different races and cultures live in harmony and mutual respect;
a world where peace is built with justice, and justice is guided by love.
Give us the inspiration and courage to build it.

Amen.

- Prayers for Justice

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