“All folk are your creation and… have dignity.”

Hymn: “Stir Your Church, O God, Our Father” – Milburn Price (1938-   )
Tune: MADILL (A. L. Butler)

Here is the full hymnline for today:
    Give to us a social conscience
    which enables us to see
    That all folk are your creation
    and that they have dignity.

Following on the heels of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it seems appropriate that we take up this line from Milburn Price’s most-sung hymn.

For me, this is a prayer of reminder – one that prompts me to be unjudgmental in my Christian witness. If we are not careful, we will develop prejudicial opinions about people groups (not just racial) who are different for us, and in that bias we can subconsciously marginalize them before we realize it.

In staged drama, there is usually a prompter whose job it is to keep up with the script and be at the ready offstage to rescue the actor who disremembers a line and risks throwing off the whole production. The actor KNOWS the lines; he/she just momentarily forgets. Those of us who have stood in that frozen on-stage position are grateful for those who whisper what we know but have momentarily forgotten.

Hymnlines like this assist us in our lapses – those times when we are less than Kingdom people… when we forget our lines… when we are at risk of derailing the cause of Christ. We are jarred back into the social consciousness to which we aspire and are set back onto the better path, adhering to the Script as life’s drama unfolds.