Evening Prayer: We are Imago Dei

Gracious God, who breathed Your own image into every soul,

Tonight I come before You carrying the weight and the wonder of what it means to bear Your likeness. Acts 2:17-18 tells us You pour out Your Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, servants and free. Not some. All. In the Black Church, we have always known this truth in our bones: that the same God who parted the Red Sea also parted the chains of oppression, because You will not abide Your image being defaced in any of Your children.

Lord, I confess that some days I forget. I pass the woman at the bus stop with her grocery bags splitting at the seams, and I don't see Your face. I scroll past the headlines and let my heart go numb. Forgive me. Reawaken the holy sight that Pentecost promises — the vision that sees prophets in our teenagers, dreamers in our elders, and the fire of Your Spirit resting on every head in this sanctuary and beyond its walls.

Tonight, let this prayer move from my lips to my hands. Where there is a neighbor who has been told they don't matter, let me be the one who says, "You are Imago Dei — the image of the Living God — and nobody can strip that from you." Where there is weariness, pour out the same Spirit that set tongues ablaze in that upper room. Make me an instrument of the justice You have always intended — not someday justice, but right now justice, the kind that rolls down like waters.

In the name of Jesus, who looked into the faces of the forgotten and said, "You belong to Me." Amen.