This is a special additional week of Covenant Home Altar devotions from Linda Gilmore, reflecting on God’s mercy and forgiveness. Through Scripture and stories from everyday life, Gilmore considers how God’s mercy shapes the way we understand forgiveness, community, and our own response to God’s grace.
Commentary
Imagination as a Christian Practice
As the daughter of immigrants, I frequently imagine how my life would be different had I been born on the other side of our national border. It could easily have happened; if my parents hadn’t had the opportunity to study and then work in the United States, I would have grown up in Hong Kong like several of my cousins, subject first to British rule and later to China’s increasingly authoritarian regime. Yet instead of the high-rise skylines of Hong Kong, my childhood topography was the vast horizons of the Midwest, cornfields kissing the wide blue heavens.
Would I have heard the gospel if it weren’t for the Chinese immigrant church of my childhood and later the large evangelical church further along the Iowa River? Would I have found financial stability? Would I feel the freedom to write my mind?
“By accident of birth” is how I think of my life and the alternate universes that could have been—and so my imagination, which tends to run wild, easily identifies with those designated as “other” by my fellow Americans. I could have been born in Hong Kong, or rural China, or even further afield in Cambodia or the Congo or Cameroon. If God’s love extends equally to every person, then my loyalty as a Christian cannot stop at national borders. I must hope for and work toward the flourishing of every human.
“We’ve become preoccupied with protecting our own interests, but the ‘our’ is too small. “
— Kristin T. Lee
In light of our kinship in God’s family, a friend recently asked me how our faith might shape the way we think about borders. I’ve been told by people smarter than me that open borders could never work. Yet I keep thinking about Mary and Joseph fleeing with baby Jesus over the border into Egypt, escaping the cruel hand of Herod who, in seeking to eliminate Jesus, slaughtered an entire town of infant boys. I can only be glad that border was porous. I can only be glad that at least one child was saved.
As I look around at the American church, I worry that our Christian imagination has become too tame, too constricted. We’ve become preoccupied with protecting our own interests, but the “our” is too small.
Although where we are each born is arbitrary, nothing is accidental about God’s attentiveness and care for each one of us. God intends and attends births in the tundra and desert and valley. Even (and perhaps especially) in the places American Christians view as undesirable or desolate or inferior, God is there.
God dwells in our manufacturing towns, and God dwells in the places where we’re dropping bombs. God’s people are among those who have faithfully served in small towns and small businesses and small churches in the U.S. for generations, and God’s people are also among those facing detention and deportation. God walks alongside the farmhand harvesting crops, the office worker crunching numbers in spreadsheets, the dishwasher scrubbing pots at the restaurant, and the parent juggling young kids at the playground. Let us rekindle our imaginations. Let us picture what our lives would be like if we had been born on the other side of a line on a map. Let us treat our siblings in Christ the way we would want to be treated if we were desperate and hungry and living in fear.
Perhaps more of us need to remember our immigrant roots. For those of us whose ancestors weren’t indigenous to this land (and that’s most of us!), we can tap into an immigrant imagination that considers the alternate universes that might have been. As redeemed people whose true home is in heaven, we know that God’s family around the entire globe is our family. Let us love those beyond our borders as family.
This article was first published in the Covenant Companion Summer 2026 issue, the official magazine of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
Kristin T. Lee
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