I received an email this morning from a dear family friend, Lisa, who has moved with her husband and eight children to Kenya for one year.  (I can’t imagine moving with my five little ones to Kentucky right now, let alone to the southern hemisphere.)  They are serving together through Alliance member Agape Children’s Ministry, aiding and loving street children.  She wrote to let me know how much she wished she could be at Summit and that she’d be praying for everyone at the conference.  One of her concluding paragraphs struck me:

“These past months have shown me, more than ever, how feeble our human attempts are to solve the issues of poverty. God MUST move for lives to be transformed and the debilitating effects of extreme poverty to be reversed. We must pray much more than we do. We must seek Him much more than we do…”

What wise and profoundly true words.  When we come face to face with the vastness of the need, and the tangle webs formed by poverty and its many interwoven struggles, we would be foolhardy to merely try to “dig deeper” from our reserves of idealism or duty or guilt.  These will all ultimately prove unequal to the task.  To persevere, we must draw from the true Source:  the love of Christ that compels us.  (This is why, as Summit’s theme states, justice and mercy flow from the Gospel.)  As we draw from this deeper wellspring, we also begin to grasp the spiritual weight present in even the most physical-seeming issues.  And so we pray.  We pray that God’s grace and power will flow into each task He has called us to.  We pray that He will deal with those subterranean issues our best efforts could never hope to touch.  We pray that He will work even as we sleep and take needed rest.  We pray that He would take the humble loaves and fish we offer and multiply them to the nourishment of many.

Please join me in praying these things for Lisa and her family, and for all who serve the orphan across the globe.  Please join me also in praying these things for Summit.