Imagine this: Three 12 year-old black kids walk into an ice cream store in an all-white section of town, only to turn to their mentor and ask: “You sure it’s cool that we’re around all these white people?” These kids had never been to this part of town, and as the mentor explained to us in a recent interview, “They were so nervous when they got there.”

Dorothy Day, the great Catholic activist, is someone I have been thinking about lately as our country’s turmoil persists and people’s sense of hope wanes. She once wrote, “People say, what good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?”

As I travel across the country on my new speaking tour, I am hearing a growing readiness and restlessness for a new, hopeful path forward where we can bring out the best in us, the best of us. This is good news—and I find myself reflecting deeply on it as Easter and Passover are upon us.

In September of 1964, King visited the Berlin Wall and spoke about “breaking down the dividing walls of hostility” that can separate people from one another. As MLK Day approaches, and our nation is mired in a seemingly endless impasse over building a wall on our southern border, I can’t help but think about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s urgings to tear down the walls that stand between us.

Just last week I was in Israel and visited the West Bank city of Bethlehem, where a young Palestinian man, Noor, took me around. As we turned a corner in the city, all of a sudden I confronted the wall that separates the West Bank and Israel. Up close, it is huge, imposing, cold and haunting. Here in the U.S., the federal government shutdown enters week three, locked in a showdown over a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. I wonder, what is the meaning of such walls?