By Jonathan Ho

Dear Readers,

Have you ever focused so much on protecting someone that you ended up hurting them?

Leading up to and after my wedding three years ago, I began to feel a sense of responsibility I hadn’t felt before. As someone who grew up in the suburbs, took private piano lessons, and had as much education as I wanted, I felt I needed to be in a place where I could provide the same for my wife and, God-willing, future family.

As someone who works in human services, the top salary of my expected career path would be somewhere near the salary of an entry level job in the tech industry (if even that). How could I, living in the expensive Greater Boston area, hope to earn enough to give someone the same standard of living I had growing up? So I did what some others might do. I started looking at ways to invest my money, running the gamut from stocks to cryptocurrencies in an attempt to develop other forms of income. Gradually, over time, this became an obsession with maximizing money, an obsession I still wrestle with today, a struggle where I can end up losing focus on God and cause me to skip time with my wife to keep up with the latest news and prices. A desire to provide for my family (not a bad desire, rather, even a godly one, see 1 Timothy 5:8) became an obsession that removed me from my family and from centering on God. Something good became something evil. Something meant to reflect God’s character became something that separated me from God and those around me.

There are many times in life when we lose sight of what is most important, all in the name of something good. In a letter to believers in Colossae, Paul describes what translators call “inordinate affection” or “lust” (Colossians 3:5). Love and passion for something are not bad, but when they go too far, they can distort into something terrible. When we lose sight of God, when we begin living for His gifts instead of Him, we start veering off course. This is our sin nature. We can see this in obsessions with money and also in how we can value our programs, efficiency, and success over the people around us.

Programs can become more important to us than people. Just as the Pharisees valued rules and laws (i.e. the Sabbath) over seeing people healed and loved, so church programs and processes can become more important than the people they were created for. It’s easy to focus on the doings and successes of what we do and fail to see the people around us, the people who form the communities we are members of.

In this edition, we hope to return to the base unit of the Church, each living stone, and see how Christ pulls us all together. We present the lives of some of our writers in their own words: how God first communed with them, how God challenged them to venture by faith to create, and how God connected them with other believers.

Our prayer is that God would use the words of this edition to open our eyes to the beauty of God’s work across different contexts and remind us all of the simplicity of walking with God in close communion and relationship. Ministry and service are important, but the basic unit of following Jesus is between us and God and between us and one another. The Church is not a building or set of ministries but a family of believers with Christ at the head.

We challenge you to take some time to again get to know the people around you as well, to take a step back from ministry goals and efficiency, to loving God and loving those around us. Take the questions we asked our writers and ask them to someone around you. May our relationship with God and others not focus on external appearances or external ministry success but flow from a deep love for one another with Jesus as our source of life.

Jesus once proclaimed to the crowds, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” (John 7:37b-38).

May we come to Jesus and drink, and find rivers of living water flow forth from us.

Jonathan

P.S. Want to connect with some of our writers or share your story? Connect with us at hello@projectarctos.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Also, have you ever felt like your relationship with God was more burden than joy? On our website, we will be publishing an exclusive new article, “Rediscovering an ‘Easy Yoke’ Devotional Life”, written by Rev. Dr. Clement Wen, that puts an organic devotional life into view, giving insight on how to change how we interact with God in relationship, from a relationship of required tasks to one that flows from an organic love. Check it out when you get a chance by visiting our website at www.projectarctos.com.