What would happen if, for just a few minutes, we set aside all of our reservations, all of our excuses, all of our hesitancies, and what if we got curious? What if we simply asked the question, “Jesus, would you teach us to pray?”

You ready for some good news? The overarching thread of the Bible is this: Wholeness. Brokenness. Repentance. Redemption. Restoration. And on and on it goes until Jesus Christ returns. The book of Micah begins with what feels like this doomsday message of judgement but eventually, hope is given.

Do you pray?

It’s a fairly simple question that often generates a complicated answer. “Well, sort of.” “I mean, I guess.“Sometimes.” Now, I get it. For many of us, our first reaction—if we’re not the praying type—is guilt.

I don’t think it’s a secret that we live in the most connected society ever. At the snap of a finger, we can pull up—on our devices—a friend from Norway or China or India. In an instant, we can send a message of communication literally around the world. Our ability to connect and accessibility to the world has never been higher. Simply put, there’s never been more opportunities to be a witness to not just the world, but to those all around us. With one message, one tweet, one snap, we could potentially have communicated with every single person in our immediate sphere. The potential for relationship has never been greater and yet, many of us are lonelier than ever. How can that be?!

Jesus didn’t avoid those who looked different, lived different or acted different from him. He didn’t hole himself up in a church or synagogue and live his life safely in the confines of other Bible-believing Jews. Jesus went to the margins of society and sought to LOVE those who were deemed different, less than or inferior to him. Jesus believed in the power of presence. What about us?

Why are we so afraid to love those different from us? How do we step into a different cultural, ethnic, societal, socio-economic, popularity relationship and lean into the tension that’s present? How do we love the person whom society would deem—either explicitly or implicitly—“the other?”