ISSUE 75 - Last Words
Dear Readers,
A new year can feel like a new opportunity, a chance for a fresh start. And while each of us will hopefully live long enough to go through many, many more cycles of new years, we can never really know how many years we will live.
As we enter 2024, we see additional uncertainty with a looming U.S. presidential election, ongoing larger wars in places such as Myanmar, Israel/Palestine, North Africa, Sudan, and Russia/ Ukraine, and a time roughly four years into a post-Covid world.
It’s with all of this in mind that we are reminded of Moses’s prayer, asking God to “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” It is in light of that prayer that we asked writers to look back and see how God has moved in their lives and to share how these recollections inform how we might suggest moving into the future.
Hua starts us off with a look into her own childhood and how the legacies of her family line speak to her calling today. Scott describes what to move towards when the door to “ministry” closes, and Matt reminds us of what friendship can look like and in another article, how God sees us. Darlene speaks to us by speaking to her past self, exhorting us to exercise encouragement and compassion as God reveals our hearts, and George closes us out with the extremely important, yet often taken for granted, reminder that the Christian faith is a relationship with our heavenly Father through Christ, not a religion (a mere system of faith and worship).
In all these works, we are reminded of the importance of love, of the relationships we have around us, and how God is a deeply personal God. He is not a set of rules and regulations, but someone who loves us and interacts directly with us.
Our prayer is that these reminders to remember the past, the importance of friendship, the fact that God sees and is near us, that our hearts require shaping to bear fruit, and that God seeks deep, continual relationship with us, will cause us to rely all the more on the Holy Spirit to reveal Scripture in how we live each day.
May we all put on the mind of Christ with the heart of God as we enter this new year.
Jonathan
Jonathan Ho, editor
P.S. Do you have any words of wisdom or experiences to share with us? Or would you like to get more involved in what we do, whether that’s requesting workshops or writing for us? Please email all questions, comments, suggestions to hello@projectarctos.com. We’d love to hear from you!
P.P.S. I want to thank Matt Reffie, Brandon Morgan, Gloria Su, and Evelyn Siao (and Linda Pang and Sherry Lee on the Chinese KRC side) for really stepping up for our previous two editions while I was out learning my first lessons on how to be a dad. They put out some excellent work which you should check out if you haven’t already!
Looking back, I can clearly see it as one larger theme gifted to my Big Grand Uncle, my family line, and to me by our Creator God. It is larger because God in His grace pointed us to His majestic attributes and design—the invisible beyond the visible of the world. God revealed Himself not only in my youth through creation but to my family in a hunger for the truth of His character.