Daily Devotion: Well

Read: John 5:1-18

Reflection Questions: What would life look like for you to be well? What visible or invisible things in your life need healing?

Prayer: Patient healer, I need your healing words, but the things that ail me are not obvious to the eye. They are internal—hurtful narratives, doubt in myself, doubt in you. I long for you to see all of me and to make me well. Show me how to get off my mat. Gratefully I pray. Amen.

—Prayer by Rev. Sarah Are | A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org

Poem: TRUTH THAT RICOCHETS

I went to a lecture once—
An interfaith conversation with
interfaith leaders.
Whispers bounced off the church’s
tile floors
As people shuffled into place,
Carrying hope alongside assumptions—
Mixed into pockets like loose change.

About halfway through the evening,
A young woman in a blue hijab
began speaking.
She was the youngest person on the panel,
Seated far to the left. You might almost
miss her
If you weren’t paying attention;
But not here, not when she spoke.

In quiet determination she told us of fear
and persecution.
She told us of hatred and racial slurs,
Thrown at her people from car windows
like bombs.
It was a truth I did not know,
And that truth ricocheted like sunlight
through the cathedral windows,
Touching almost everyone that day.

Then a man in the back, who could
have been me—
Who has been me—
Approached the microphone and said,
“Your people are persecuted. You live in
fear. You are battered by hate.
If that is true, then why am I just now
hearing about it?
Why is your story not on the news?
Why have you not spoken up about it?”

And the air was still, partly because we held
our breath in anticipation,
And partly because the Spirit slows her
dance when we stand at the edge
of truth.
The woman in the blue hijab leaned into
the microphone
And whispered with a quiet strength that
can only come from years of practice:
“We are screaming.”

If there is one truth in my life
That unfolds again and again,
It is the need to listen.

For again and again, I will try,
with good intentions,
To act and walk with love.
But again and again, I will make mistakes.
Again and again, I will say the wrong thing.
Again and again, they will call me Peter,
And again and again, they will be right.

So again and again,
I will pray for a truth that ricochets,
For ears that will listen,
And for space to hold truth.

If people are screaming,
And to be clear—people are screaming—
I do not want to miss it.