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Key Bible Verses: We have endured much ridicule from the proud, much contempt from the arrogant (Psalm 123:4).
Bonus Reading:Psalm 31:9-17

In the late 1950s a white journalist, with a dermatologist's help, temporarily changed his skin color to black. He wrote:

I walked up to the bus station ticket counter. When the ticket-seller saw me, her otherwise attractive face turned violently sour. "What do you want?" she snapped.

I asked about the next bus to Hattiesburg. She answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving the "the hate stare."

"I'd like a one-way ticket to Hattiesburg, please," I said and placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

"I can't change that big a bill," she said abruptly and turned away. Not knowing what to do, I remained at the window. In a while she flew back at me, her face flushed, and fairly shouted: "I told you—I can't change that big a bill."

"Surely," I said, "in the entire Greyhound system there must be some means of changing a ten-dollar bill. Perhaps the manager—"

She jerked the bill furiously from my hand and stepped away. She reappeared to hurl my change and the ticket on the counter with such force that most of it fell on the floor.

—John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me

How will I respond when I see meanness and spite?

There is no such thing as an insignificant human being. To treat people that way is a kind of sin.

—Debbi Fields (cookie entrepreneur)

Adapted from: Black Like Me (Dutton Signet, 1998)

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Prayer for the Week

Dear Father, please remove the cataracts of insensitivity from my eyes so that I can see others with true compassion.

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