“I think it’s important to understand people, to love them well. … You have to truly understand them.”

It is always a joy to bring the region stories like Stephanie Shover’s, who was profiled in Tuesday’s edition of the Sun-Gazette, where she shared the aforementioned thought.

Shover is a missionary with Sojourner Truth Ministries, which provides meals and services to our neighbors.

The efforts of her service — and the service of hundreds if not thousands of men and women across Lycoming County and surrounding communities — help provide relief to families struggling with some of life’s most severe challenges. It’s the sense of community service that provides an example to all and a sense that our communities can help our neighbors to meet those challenges.

It’s a sense of hope.

Hope that when lives take hard turns, the families that make up our communities will help each other. The hope that, with that help, we can all survive difficulties and work toward better lives.

This sense of service, as we’ve already noted, is something men and women of all ages should emulate — should be inspired to strive to find the ways in which they can help. With everybody or almost everybody contributing how they best can, we can best confront the problems that will unfortunately always need addressed — a need that perhaps becomes all the more urgent as the holidays approach, and as we look offering our families, our children and our neighborhoods that sense of joy we want to define this time of year.

This sense of service is a vital part of building communities, now and year-round — it’s something of which the world, including Williamsport and surrounding communities, needs more.