"And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight." ~ Philippians 1:4-6

I remember a couple of weeks ago sitting in a big group of fellow community development students and Chalmers Center staff members talking and praying about our upcoming internships. We had a week before the first of us left, and it was all of a sudden feeling very real. We were finally going on our internships that we had been thinking about for the past three years, and planning for the past semester. Of the list of emotions I was feeling, nervousness and anxiety were steadily making their way to the top.

We were going around saying our names, where we were going to be all summer, and some kind of prayer request. One of my fellow students said his name, explained that he was going to some country in Africa and what he hoped to do there, and then he said something along of the lines of "Pray that I'll be able to love people." He further explained that the past three years of studying community development had in a sense made it harder to think about the people we were going to be working with as Christ would have us think about them. We spent the entire last semester learning about surveys and note taking, and how to talkt to people about their income level without offending them, but it was easy for many of us to forget that ultimately we are learning to love others.

So what my friend was asking was that he would be reminded that he is in need of Christ's grace that enables us to give love to others in the first place. He was asking that we would be able to see the people we work with as more than numbers on our surveys, or statistics in our reports, that we would see them as human beings made in God's image, broken by the fall and in need of the grace and love of Christ the same as us.

So just as Paul prayed that the Philippians would grow in love, and that it would abound more and more in knowledge and dept of insight, pray for me and my fellow students. Please pray that as our knowledge increases, as we learn more of what it is like to do community development in the field, that our love would grow, and our desire to share the grace of our Lord would flow forth from our hands and our tongues.