Pray

Sometimes a prayer can be answered your heart and sometimes it takes divine intervention.

Today I sought God in prayer by beginning with some scripture found in the Book of Wisdom, a book left out of the traditional bible. It was interesting enough to center me in my prayer. However it was cut short because the phone was ringing incessantly, and so I felt incomplete and unfinished. Then I read a daily bible verse from my Bible app on my phone. It was from James 5:16. "Confess you sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results"

The art of greeting a stranger in kindness is to enter in a relationship with that person. Even if it is only for a brief moment while standing in a checkout line or sitting for hours next to a person on an airplane, commit to the relationship. To do that you have to listen, be engaged in the conversation, and in your heart be also in prayer. You do not have to confess your sins as if they are some priest, nor do you have to have the answers to any problem they might share with you, you simply have to be committed to the time you share together.
In our commitment we uphold what we have been called to do, and that is to love one another. Even the shortest encounters can have a lasting impact, especially if you lift that person up in prayer as you walk away. In doing so the results can pretty amazing.

Meditate: let me enter without fear, a loving and gentle relationship; hoping that whoever I meet today will pray for me as I will also do.

Pray: God give me strength and courage to give myself over to you, to greet the strangers in my life as if one of them is you; whether they are people in my daily life who have yet to meet or the homeless who I am afraid to meet. God you love us all.