Time is of the essence. Every moment we let pass without reaching out to a brother risks a relationship torn beyond repair.

We must be fierce but gentle. We can find our way back to each other.

Remember that we belong to one another. Everything starts and ends with my brother.

Our brother urgently needs us. We cannot afford to delude ourselves or take the easy road.

Our brother needs us and we need him. We cannot allow the world to drive us apart, nor take our brother for granted.

Our individual survival depends on our ability to protect our bond. We have to dig in; we have to be purposeful.

When we allow our brother to fail we are setting ourselves up for failure as well.

When we make a commitment to one another what we are saying is that time will not

change our promise to carry one another’s burdens.

This world is a desert and only action has meaning.

It is time to offer our brother a glass of water, especially our brothers across racial, economic,

gender, and class lines.

If we aren’t deliberate then the healing with our brother will be nothing more than a thought.

Anyone can point out failure, but it takes real courage and immense strength of spirit

to engage one another wherever the bridge has been broken.

What is it to truly to care for one another? At its most basic, caring for one another means to carry our brother.

To carry one another’s pain, to go so far as to carry each other bodily if that is what is necessary. Contention must be transformed to sacrifice.

It has nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with commitment. We forget, or maybe we never knew, that our brother’s success determines our own success.

The list of what separates us is endless. We treat each other like siblings across lines of race, gender, ability, class.

Brothers of every kind are torn apart by rivalries in need of mending. Labels blind us to our kinship: Rich, poor; young, old; black, white; gay, straight; male, female.

We can set aside the differences that obscure our brotherhood, a oneness that far outweighs whatever separates us. Often it takes extraordinary suffering to bring brothers back to caring for one another, to stop the competition, the one upmanship, the disrespect.

“Carry each other’s burdens.” Galatians 6:2 (NIV)

We don’t carry each other’s burdens because it’s just easier to transact socially with people of our own ilk.

The pain of attempting to end inequality, and failing, is better than the alternative. If we do nothing then we live in condemnation from our own conscience.

Ending inequality is an impossible task, of course, given human frailty. And yet we must persist.

I have looked at the Japanese painting of Mt. Fuji all my life but I never saw that a mountain is in the center of the picture. I only saw the waves and wondered why it was called Mt. Fuji.

Often we assume that our biases are harmless even when we know they are wrong. But the same kind of blindness then pervades all our thinking and unless we are reflective, we could find ourselves in the middle of a mess of our own making with no warning.

Bias is a built-in error that makes everything that comes after it wrong. Once we accept a biased idea as true, it colors all our other thoughts even though it is wrong.

Without blame or accusation, we are responsible for keeping our side of the street clean. Small acts are effective because many people do nothing at all.

In the face of nothing, small actions carry a lot of weight. Look around: Life is overflowing with injustice right where we are.

A warrior knows that one battle is not the war. Be like the warrior and win one small battle at a time.

We don’t have to be preemptive. We can have confidence that necessary preparation will be adequate to face situations as they arise.

There has to be a childlike sense of injustice and a desire to defend the innocent if we want to right the wrongs of the past. Healing only comes from an innocent heart purified by grief, like a child who loves anyway even when betrayed.

To see the possibility of a solution we have to look at racism from a thousand years away. The problem of race is not solvable unless we accept as valid that our lives today are connected to an ancient past that lives and breaths in us now.

Our basic assumptions are the thing that we must rethink if we have any commitment to resolving the injustices of society. I had to be willing to rephrase things that were said to me so that I saw the speaker as a friend rather than an adversary.

While we may be content with our personal situation we have an obligation to assure that our neighbor also is comfortable. It is nearly impossible to see life from another’s perspective and yet we must try.

It’s not enough to only do no harm. We have to be willing to love the unknown and to love that which we hate or fear.