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Roosevelt’s response was a Christlike response. Rather than see people as problems, Christ saw them as opportunities.

May we consider a few more Cornelius moments?

You and your buddies enter the cafeteria, carrying your lunch trays. As you take your seat at the table, one of the guys elbows you and says, “Get a load of the new kid.” You have no trouble spotting him. He’s the only student wearing a turban. Your friend makes this wisecrack: “Still wearing his towel from the shower.”

You might have made a joke yourself, except yesterday your pastor shared the story of Peter and Cornelius and read this verse: “God has shown me that he doesn’t think anyone is unclean or unfit” (Acts 10:28 CEV).

Hmmm.

The guy in the next cubicle wears boots, chews tobacco, and drives a truck with a rifle rack. You wear loafers, eat health food, and drive a hybrid, except on Fridays when you pedal your bike to work. He makes racist jokes. Doesn’t he notice that you are black? He has a Rebel flag as a screen saver. Your great-grandfather was a slave. You’d love to distance yourself from this redneck.

Yet this morning’s Bible study included this challenge: “God has shown me that he doesn’t think anyone is unclean or unfit” (v. 28 CEV).

Now what do you do?

One more. You are the superintendent of an orphanage. In dealing with the birth certificates, you come across a troubling word: illegitimate. As you research further, you learn that the word is a permanent label, never to be removed from the certificate.

This is what Edna Gladney discovered. And she couldn’t bear the thought of it. If legitimate means to be legal, lawful, and valid, what does illegitimate mean? Can you imagine living with such a label?

Mrs. Gladney couldn’t. It took her three years, but in 1936 she successfully lobbied the Texas legislature to remove the term from birth documents.3

God calls us to change the way we look at people. Not to see them as Gentiles or Jews, insiders or outsiders, liberals or conservatives. Not to label. To label is to libel. “We have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16 NLT).

Let’s view people differently; let’s view them as we do ourselves. Blemished, perhaps. Unfinished, for certain. Yet once rescued and restored, we may shed light, like the two stained-glass windows in my office.

My brother found them on a junkyard heap. Some church had discarded them. Dee, a handy carpenter, reclaimed them. He repainted the chipped wood, repaired the worn frame. He sealed some of the cracks in the colored glass. The windows aren’t perfect. But if suspended where the sun can pass through, they cascade multicolored light into the room.

In our lifetimes you and I are going to come across some discarded people. Tossed out. Sometimes tossed out by a church. And we get to choose. Neglect or rescue? Label them or love them? We know Jesus’ choice. Just look at what he did with us.

You [Jesus] are worthy to take the scroll

and to open its seals,

because you were slain,

and with your blood you purchased men for God

from every tribe and language and people and nation.

(Rev. 5:9 NIV)

Father, you have used all types of people for your holy purposes: prostitutes, murderers, persecutors, liars, thieves, swindlers, the illiterate, the ignorant, the blind, the lame. Grant me the grace to treat everyone I meet as someone for whom Jesus died and rose again. Let there be no unwholesome or unholy distinctions in my eyes and no unworthy favoritism in my actions. Rather, make me into a vessel through whom Jesus shines. In Christ’s name I pray, amen.

CHAPTER 15

Pray First; Pray Most

But while Peter was in prison,

the church prayed very earnestly for him.

—ACTS 12:5 (NLT)

King Herod suffered from a Hitler-level obsession with popularity. He murdered the apostle James to curry favor with the populace. The execution bumped his approval rating, so he jailed Peter and resolved to behead him on the anniversary of Jesus’ death. (Would you like a little salt with that wound?)

He placed the apostle under