The Daily Prayer
WEDNESDAY, February 5, 2020
On February 1, 1960, four college students—Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain—initiated the first sit-in demonstration at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The store manager ignored the protestors, hoping they would leave. The next day, twenty-seven more students came to protest. By February 5, three hundred students had arrived, igniting a mass movement of sit-ins for desegregation throughout the South.
Eighteenth-century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote, “The great and firm foundation of the spiritual life is the offering of ourselves to God and being subject to his will in all things. We must completely forget ourselves, so that we regard ourselves as an object which has been sold and over which we no longer have any rights. We find all our joy in fulfilling God’s pleasure—his happiness, his glory and the fact that he is our great and only delight. Once we have this foundation, all we need to do is spend our lives rejoicing that God is God and being so wholly abandoned to his will that we are quite indifferent as to what we do and equally indifferent as to what use he makes of our activities.”
Lord, remind us that it is not always agitated uprisings and nonstop activity which leads to justice, but that change often comes through the quiet commitment of a small group of people. Help us raise our small body of people to set about quietly becoming the change we want to see in the world. Amen.
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