It’s the middle of the sweltering Bangkok workday, and I’m wrestling with God in the back of a taxi on my way home from prison. I’m slipping around on hot vinyl as my theology gets pressed and squeezed like the limes at the juice stand outside my window.

I’ve just visited my friend Nina.* She used to be my English student, but for the past year she’s been locked up in Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Center (IDC) with no end date in sight. I bring her food, toiletries, and crafty things to keep her mind busy which the guards pass on to her. She will need them, as the prison gives her just rice and dirty water. She sleeps on a hard floor with no bed.

Two metal fences separate us. We are both women, the same age, living in 2017. But what keeps her on one side of the fence and me on the other is that I am American and she is Somali.

Read the rest over at She Loves Magazine as I explore the meaning of loving my neighbor.