Featuring Sami DiPasquale, the founder and director of Abara on the US-Mexico border, and Board member of Micah Global.
Digital collage of 9 film photos
I see these chairs as self-portraits, each one a different person. Each placed in its own environment – its own mission field. Despite the things that make us unique, our function and purpose remain the same. As we invite others to our tables across lands and cultures, in Christ, perhaps we are inviting others to the same table after all.
Wisdom invites us to a table – a place of humility, curiosity, deep listening, and shared humanity. And here on the US-Mexico border, I’m learning that the table is never just about who sits at it, but where the table is placed. When we set a table within view of an 18-foot border fence, topped with razor wire, something happens. Fears absorbed from a thousand kilometres away begin to loosen. You hear mariachi music drifting from the other side, smell someone’s barbecue, see cars passing by – and suddenly you realise, “I’m not afraid.” Yet at the same time: “I can’t even interact with the person on the other side. They aren’t invited to the table right now.”
That awareness opens a deeper question of justice. Scripture is a story of people on the move – displaced, crossing borders, met by a God who draws near. When we sit at Wisdom’s table, we’re invited not only to hear stories, but to let those stories do something inside us. To let lament come. To let curiosity crack open a door. To let our own worldview be shifted toward the Kingdom Jesus announces: one that confronts systems of exclusion while calling us into mutuality, dignity, and peace.
And so discipleship looks like this: coming to the table with no agenda except to receive. Listening and listening again. Being moved enough to ask, “Who is still missing from the table? And what would it mean to move the table – or myself – so they can be fully welcomed?”
God of the poor, we thank you for the life and light of the gospel. Grant us the wisdom of your Spirit to see the suffering around us with your eyes of justice. Break down the walls of our indifference, and the comfortable partitions that separate us from our neighbours and from your truth. We pray not for easy answers, but for the grace to act together to build your reign of peace and justice here on Earth. May our hands be your hands, our voices your prophetic voice, until all barriers fall and all creation is made whole. Amen.
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