The Fellows are taking turns sharing what God is doing their lives as they grow as disciples and leaders. This is from Mary Elizabeth Caldwell (more about her at the end):
The Greensboro Fellows year has provided a great opportunity to wrestle with how faith and work interact. For example, we have been learning about justice and mercy, and how to enact them in our individual lives.
One weekend in November, the Greensboro Fellows joined 14 other Fellows programs from around the east coast at a conference, where the theme was Micah 6:8: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
We learned walking humbly with God is the foundation for doing justice and loving mercy, and justice and mercy are really two sides to the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. The first is essentially making wrong things right, while the second adds compassion on top of it.
The question posed to each of us: how do we carry out this Micah 6:8 mandate in our own lives? We fellows have done a lot of talking and thinking over this topic, but we also realized we have to act.
In my own life, Micah 6:8 has played out very practically. For my internship, I have been at Hope Academy, a Christian middle school designed to spiritually mentor and academically boost 5ththrough 8th graders in a less-advantaged part of town. At Hope Academy, enacting mercy and justice looks like valuing those our culture says are less valuable based on appearance, age, social status, and/or academic abilities. This means showing them love and attention, learning their stories, beginning to understand their perspectives, seeing them as capable, and getting them to see themselves as capable.
Over the last few months, I have been slowly learning how to do these things as my eyes are opened to this strong connection between what I believe about justice and mercy and how I live them out. However, the only way I can truly, genuinely do this is with God’s help. The key is that last line of the verse: “walk humbly with your God.” Without humility, priorities and motivations grow selfish, lazy, prideful, or any other similar thing.
We can’t all change the world, but we CAN impact the situations surrounding us by identifying those areas of injustice and taking steps to right them.
Mary Elizabeth Caldwell graduated with an undergraduate degree in math and masters degree in teaching from University of Virginia. She was a leader in Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ) at UVA, and volunteers with Cru at UNCG in Greensboro. She loves to teach, tutor, mentor, and develop people. She swims for a hobby, and recently competed in a local swim meet. Her stability, wisdom, and kind heart is a gift to us all.
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