Dear fellow brothers and sisters, as the new school year approaches for those of us that are college students, I humbly ask for your prayers. There are many requests I have, so I'll list them one by one:
1. Please pray for general academic success and for finding the appropriate balance of school and activities. I'm taking five classes (19 credits) this semester, so I'll be very busy. The college I'm going to makes it pretty hard to get As, and I'm Pre-Med, so grades are important.
2. Please pray for my spiritual walk. Recently God has convicted me of the need to spend more time with Him one-on-one in prayer and quiet times. At the same time, He is helping me grow in my faith intellectually.
3. Please pray for my campus. Although the Christians are many, the voice is fractured. There are many different fellowships, but they do not interact with each other. Some of them have no desire to, due to racial and denominational hurt as well as previous history. I am involved in a group that is working to bring unity amongst the groups despite racial and denominational differences. It is a vision I was skeptical about, but God has been doing amazing things. We had great success last year in bringing the fellowships together one night at the end of the year to celebrate our God, and the vision of unity was spread. Now it is time to put that vision and excitement into practice in some joint activities. Please pray for unity amongst the groups this year (resulting in an increased presence on campus) so that people may see that our God is the only true God.
4. Please pray for wisdom. I am starting a volunteer position as a Residential Mentor in my residence hall from last year. Basically, I work with an RA on a floor as a more personal mentor for those students. I can be a shy person, but I can also be very extroverted. Please pray that God will help me to be more extroverted, warm, friendly and wise.
5. Please pray for my friend Matt. He is currently in my fellowship and is one of the guys I am closest to. While he has a tremendous spiritual fire, he is a Biblical Unitarian. Basically, he does not believe in the Trinity. He believes that God the Father is God, that Jesus was a perfect man who was able to be our sacrifice, and that the Holy Spirit is merely a gift. Needless to say, this causes significant difference in his understanding of God. We have had discussions about why Jesus must be God, but they have gotten nowhere, as he defends his beliefs by taking various verses from the Bible out of context. It's clear that he doesn't really want to reason this out, probably because his entire family are Biblical Unitarians as well. He is going to an evangelical church, but he is realizing that there is going to come a time where he'll split from our fellowship to start his own Bible study. Please pray that God will show him the light, and pray that I may be wise in dealing with and loving Him.
Thank you all very much for taking the time to read this. 2 Corinthians 13:14.