Spiritual Corner: The Blessing and Importance of Unity Randy and I ran in the St. Jude Memphis half marathon on December 1st. It was an amazing experience. There were 26,000 participants in the 4 races that they held that day. Then there were countless supporters on the sidelines of the race, cheering for the runners. My parents were included in this group of spectators—they’re the best! One thing I loved about this race, is that I never felt alone. No matter how fast or slow you ran, there were always people around you, so you never had to feel by yourself. I think this is a good representation of God. No matter how you feel that your life is going—whether you feel like it’s moving so fast that you can barely catch your breath or whether your struggling to barely make it through each day—you can take comfort in knowing that you’re never alone. God is right there with you through every moment of every day. He can carry you when you are too tired to keep going or He can slow the pace down if you think it’s all going too fast. As it says in Hebrews 13:5, “[He] will never leave you or forsake you”. Another thing that I loved about this race was the unity of it. Thousands and thousands of participants and spectators gathered together in support of St. Jude and in support of children who are battling cancer. When I surveyed all of the people that I was surrounded by, I started to consider how the whole group undoubtedly had many, many differences. I’m sure there were some strong conservatives, but there were also some strong liberals. I’m sure there were people with all kinds of different beliefs and feelings about different hot topics in our society, however, we all had one thing that bound us together and that was our mutual support of St. Jude and our desire to help the children of this world who have cancer. That is a good and noble thing to support and it was something that over 26,000 people could agree on. It made me start to think…if that large of a group of people can come together in support of a specific cause, why can’t we come together over other things in our country? Why do we have to have all of the negative talk about other people and political parties? Why can’t we be more unified? I know that you might say it’s because we disagree on so many things, BUT why can’t we try and find the things that we DO agree on? Because I’m sure, if we dig deep enough, they are there. And then once we discover those things that we can come together on, we should strive to build from there. Instead of us being so dead-set against everything the opposite political party says, let’s seek to understand where they’re coming from and seek to find unity with them, even if it’s in the smallest of areas. We’re never going to accomplish much if we are divided. As Christians, even if we are in a minority, we need to seek peace with others and through that peace, show the love of Christ to everyone we encounter. We need to unite with other Christians and uplift and encourage one another. Then we need to reach out to others in this world, not forcing our beliefs upon them, but standing firm in our convictions and showing them the LOVE of Jesus. We need to start striving to unite the world around us. Love is contagious. And I believe deep down in the heart of most people, there is a desire for love and for good to happen in the world. We were ALL created in the image of God and so we need to strive to look more like Him every day and strive to unite one another to help make this world a better place. The St. Jude Memphis Marathon weekend is a good start to uniting our world and pointing it towards good. I pray we can all start uniting more with our neighbors in an effort to bring Christ to a broken world. --Dana Alexander