By Esther James
This week’s reading for our Leadership, Vocation & Society class with Rev. Irwyn Ince was full of passages calling us to unity in Christ. In Romans 15, Paul prays that God would give the Romans a spirit of unity “so that with one heart and mouth [they] may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This passage and others that we read can be summed up into a prayer for God to bind us together in him. That night after class, during prayer time with my host family, my host dad prayed for God to bind us together. As this theme has been on my mind a lot, I wanted to share some thoughts from my seat on the Metro about how the 12 of us are being bound together.
We’re bound together by a love for coffee. We’re bound together by contracts we signed to be in this program and by a pact we wrote one month ago during our Kickoff Retreat promising to pray for and support one another throughout these nine months. But ultimately, we’re bound together by Christ – the only reason the 12 of us have even found ourselves here.
I’m learning that unity requires being fully invested where I am.
We’re headed into month two of our Capital Fellows year and we’re still discovering what it looks like to be bound together and yet be spread out over 30+ miles during our internships. We’re learning how to be united in prayer throughout the week as we find ourselves caught up in full schedules, balancing the multiple facets of this program and our personal lives.
Three days a week, we are scattered throughout Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. doing a variety of seemingly unrelated work at our internships from working on Capitol Hill to working at Jill’s House. Yet, as we’re learning in class, we’ve all been given the same call to seek shalom, the flourishing of our communities as we bring order out of chaos. While we share this call, individually we’re learning how to do this on a day to day basis at work. For me, bringing order out of chaos often looks like writing Excel functions to find answers amidst piles data. For others, working for the flourishing of the community looks like teaching English classes to refugees from around the world.
I’m learning that unity requires being fully invested where I am. It’s easy to get caught up in the long to-do lists from work to classes, but during times like Round Table and dinner with my host family (Phillips fam, y’all are awesome!), being present in the community is so valuable. These are the times where relationships grow and we get to share our lives with one another, reuniting after long days apart.
I’m really grateful for these 11 other Fellows and the time we’ve been given to grow alongside one another. I’m grateful for Friday nights spent together in the kitchen making kabobs and watching movies and for “Fellowship Wednesdays” when we hang out because it’s been a whole 48 hours since we last saw one another. I’m grateful for the former Fellows classes who have welcomed us into their homes providing space for new friendships to form. In these very tangible ways we are seeing God continually bringing us together and forming deep, eternal friendships.
As we head into our second month of Fellows, would you pray for us that God would continue to bind us together in him? We are so grateful for your prayers and continued support.
Pictures from the Week
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