Emmanuel, God with us, thank You for this moment in time where we can focus on You and what You have done and continue to do for us in this life. You bless us each time we breathe, each morning that wake up, and each time that we move forward for Your cause. Thank You for the gift of faith in Christ because our faith gives us hope and hope gives us all a new way to share in the dream that God has for our lives. Stop us from squandering our inheritance of grace by excluding our faith from others. Give us the wisdom to look beyond the human race and focus instead on the human family of God’s children. A family comprised of sinners made saints by grace alone. You Lord, provide for all of our needs but the world provides for our greed. It is not God that separates mankind; we do just fine in the department. And when we do this, when we exclude others from witnessing God’s love through our lives, then we bankrupt ourselves from loving others as we are loved. So rewrite the narrative for our lives so that we can be compassion, we can be mercy, and we can be love. We can be all these things because greater is He that lives in us than he that is in the world. (1 John 4:4) Lord, let our lives be a demonstration of Your dream for us all to live courageously and freely knowing that love paid the ultimate price and washed away all our sins. Let us invest into the dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; (Martin Luther King) “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all shall see it.” (2 Isaiah 40:4-5). Courage not fear is our way of saying we will follow the Lord and trust in His steadfast love.