If you don’t tell me your religious beliefs, I won’t tell you mine.

In my mind’s eye I can see a man that harbors resentment toward me because he attaches me to a religious label that he believes represents everything he is against in the world. I’m imagining coming upon the man along the everyday paths of life and feeling his bitterness. I carry God’s love for that man and the whole world within me, and so I say to him, “Sir, sixty-five hundred Africans die every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of medicine you and I can buy at any drugstore. One million girls every year around the world are forced into child prostitution because the will to stop it pales in comparison to the will to perpetuate it. Every day one hundred thousand American children are homeless. Right now in Nashville, fifteen families with small children live in their cars. If you don’t tell me your religious beliefs, I won’t tell you mine. Right now I humbly greet and honor you in that place where you and I are one, that place of God’s love for the ‘least of these.’”

- Jim Palmer, Wide Open Spaces