Job 31:15

Job is one of the oldest books in the Bible, telling the story of a man who was deeply faithful to God yet suffered tremendous loss — his family, wealth, and health. In this chapter, Job is making a formal defense of his integrity before God, listing all the ways he has lived with righteousness. Here, he is specifically defending how he treated his servants. In the ancient world, servants were considered property with few rights, yet Job argues that the same God who formed him also formed them — in the womb, before either of them had status or power. It is a radical claim for its time: that being made by the same Creator makes all people equal in dignity and worth.

God, you formed every person I will meet today with the same care you used to make me. Forgive me for the ways I sort people by usefulness or likability. Open my eyes to see your image in the ones I most often overlook. Amen.

There is a kind of math we do with people without realizing it — sizing them up, sorting them into categories of "important" and "less so." The person who takes your order. The co-worker no one listens to in meetings. The neighbor you have never quite gotten around to knowing. Job, a wealthy man in a culture where wealth determined everything about your value, looked at his servants and saw something that stopped him cold: the same hands that shaped him shaped them too. What would change if you actually believed that — not as a theological concept, but in the muscle memory of how you move through an ordinary Tuesday? It is easy to affirm human dignity in the abstract. It is harder when the person in front of you is exhausting, or inconvenient, or just very different from you. Job's question is not rhetorical. It is an invitation to see what he saw — and to let that seeing slowly change what you do next.