大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Dr Krish Kandiah

Good Morning.

It felt like trespassing on holy ground, but there I was: stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out across the waters towards the striking Washington monument. Apart from a couple of tourists, it was relatively empty on that crisp January afternoon. The strongest evidence something world changing had happened there were four words etched into the stone steps: "I have a dream." In the stillness, I tried to imagine that sunny day when Martin Luther King Jr addressed a crowd of a quarter of a million people uttering what would become the most famous speech of the 20th century. With television and radio coverage, King's dream echoed around the world, not only that day but over and again for the following six decades and beyond.

King continues to inspire people around the world, but he himself drew inspiration from the book of Amos in the Bible. His most-quoted verse is the following:

鈥淏ut let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!鈥�

It鈥檚 a powerful message. Behind where King was delivering his speech millions of gallons of water would have been pouring from the Potomac River into the Tidal Basin and out into Chesapeake Bay. That鈥檚 hundreds of cubic metres per second. A force for good that powerful could surely wash away the injustices of our racially divided countries.

Martin Luther King would have been 92 today. Just as the Potomac river has continued to roll on each day, so does the hope that drove King鈥檚 dream, and the never-failing challenge to all of us of pursuing what is right and good.

Lord God, thank you that your love knows no borders or boundaries. You value each of us the same no matter what our circumstances or skin colour. Thank you for your call to pursue justice for all, until the day you return to take us home.

Amen.

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