Monday Meditation
+ Day 5: Saying No to the Wrong Kind of Power
Day 5: Saying No to the Wrong Kind of Power
Satan offered Jesus the world—power over kingdoms, authority over people. Jesus refused. He chose the way of love over the way of control. How often do we chase after the wrong kind of power? Where might God be calling us to say no?
Monday Meditation: Power With and the Practice of Fugitivity
Power has been taught to us as a thing to own, to grasp, to hold over others—a zero-sum game where someone must be above, and someone must be below. But what if power is not something to possess, but something to share? What if real power is found in the spaces between us, in movement, in refusal, in fugitivity?
Power with. Power in motion. Power that does not bind, but frees.
James Baldwin urges us:
“The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”
Power with is power that reshapes the world, not by force but by the courageous act of making space. It is the quiet and persistent work of inviting, listening, holding, and learning. It is power that does not hoard, but multiplies when given away.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us:
“An individual has not started living until they can rise above the narrow confines of their individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
Power with means refusing isolation, refusing the temptation of control. It means standing with—not just for—the marginalized, learning not just to speak but to hear, to respond, to co-create.
And yet, the world does not always make room for this kind of power. The world is built on the machinery of control—of surveillance, extraction, domination. Angela Davis teaches us that:
“Freedom is a constant struggle.”
Real power, then, is not just shared—it is escaped into, practiced fugitively, discovered in the cracks of empire. Fred Moten tells us that fugitivity is “the general antagonism to sovereignty” and “the undercommons of enlightenment.” To claim power with is to refuse to let power be owned. It is to live in ways that do not conform to the logics of capital, whiteness, and control, but instead seek fugitive spaces of possibility—places where the ungovernable brilliance of community, love, and liberation can take root.
So today, let us meditate on this:
• Where in my life am I still clutching onto power as mine alone?
• Where is power asking to be shared, woven together, built in community?
• How can I cultivate power that nurtures rather than dominates?
• How am I being invited into the fugitive spaces where freedom is practiced outside the gaze of empire?
To practice power with is to trust that our liberation is tied together. It is to understand that the strongest structures are not rigid but interwoven—like the roots of trees, like the hands of the faithful, like the voices rising in harmony.
May we seek power that frees rather than binds, power that gathers rather than scatters, power that lifts rather than crushes.
And may we build—with, always with.