THE LINES THAT DECIDE WHO BELONGS ___Tuesday (07/28/2026): St. Worships & Gospel Demos with Berkeley/Oakland Neighbors
Every civilization draws lines.
Some are drawn upon maps to define nations.
Some are drawn upon roads to guide travelers.
Some are drawn upon blueprints to shape cities.
But the most important lines are the ones drawn upon the human conscience, for they quietly determine who is welcomed, who is overlooked, and who is left standing outside.
A divided bench is more than a piece of furniture.
A fence is more than a boundary.
A barrier is more than a structure.
Each becomes a sentence written into the landscape, declaring who may remain and who must keep moving.
These are the lines that decide who belongs.
Yet belonging has never been created by concrete.
It has always been created by compassion.
A city that draws its boundaries according to fear will discover that its walls grow taller while its heart grows smaller.
A nation that measures human worth by comfort, productivity, or appearance will eventually find itself protecting places more faithfully than people.
But the Kingdom of God draws another kind of line.
It stretches from one wounded neighbor to another.
It crosses every border that pride establishes.
It refuses to divide humanity into the worthy and the forgotten.
The Cross itself is Heaven's answer to every line that separates.
Raised outside the city gate, where exclusion reached its greatest expression, it erased the boundary between God and humanity through sacrificial love. What the world divided, Christ reconciled. What fear rejected, grace embraced.
Every generation must therefore decide what kind of lines it will leave behind. Will they become walls that imprison compassion?
Or bridges that invite strangers into community?
History will remember the boundaries we constructed.
God will remember the neighbors we welcomed.
For in the end, the lines that matter most are not the ones engraved upon stone, painted upon pavement, or traced across political maps.
They are the unseen lines drawn within the heart—the lines that determine whether another human being is treated as a burden to remove or a neighbor to receive.
A civilization finds its true greatness not when it perfects the boundaries of exclusion, but when it redraws them with mercy.
Only then do the lines that once divided become pathways that lead us home.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
July 28, 2026
https://www.facebook.com/steven.g.lee1/posts/pfbid027TXT1edagmjHJzd6JSM7wy8GZjZmepm1TMXD2VASJJh5CbgJaPA3w4AuSFcxdiqCl
0 comments:
Post a Comment