Because People We Care about, Care About Them

Every Friday, our whole staff of teachers -kindergarten through twelfth grade- has morning devotions together for fifteen minutes before the students arrive. As of last Monday, no one was scheduled to share on Friday morning. I ended up doing the devotional. Here is the partial text of what I shared.

I am here today, because Colleen sent out an email asking for volunteers to share this morning . . . and none of you replied.

She emailed me three days ago:

To: Jack
From: Colleen
Regarding: Friday’s staff chapel vacancy.

“Hey Jack, you’re a talker. . . .”

So here goes.

There are a lot of things that Julie, the girls, and I love about Hong Kong. There are a lot of things that we love about ICS. But one of the things that we love the most is the sense of community we experience here on a weekly basis. We have never experienced anything quite like it. Part of it is due to the fact that the people we work with, worship with, live with, and hang out with are actually. . . the same people. Which I think is a lot closer to the way that we were designed to live, than a life-style in which we all commute thirty minutes in different directions to go to work, school, and church.

Of course, the fact that this is a community build around acommon commitment to the Lordship of Christ makes it pretty distinctive as well.

The third thing that makes this community so special is the fact that a large portion of us are living so far from the places our people came from. When you are far from family, your friends tend to become your de facto family. We end up sharing each other’s joys and carrying each other’s burdens.

We end up carrying about people we never met because people we care about care about them.

A song –drawing upon the Book of Acts- that I used to sing in Sunday School asserts “They will know that we are Christians by our love.” Absolutely, this is referring to the love that we give to a hurting word. But it also means that the world will know that we are Christians by the love that we show to one another.

This week, the ICS family seems to have been hit particularly hard. Henry is making preparation to fly home to Nigeria to bury his dad, Ben is waiting for an inevitable phone call regarding his dad in Canada, we are all just reeling from the difficult news coming out of kindergarten, people we care about have people they care about down in New Zealand who are hurting.

And Julie and I got some heart-wrenching news of our own a week ago yesterday.

I know that none of you knew my brother-in-law Ken, but as an acknowledgment of all the hardships we help each other carry, I would to like share a little bit about him. To be honest, this doesn’t need to be about Ken, I could just as easily be reading a tribute to Henry’s father or Ben’s father –and if I had known them as well as I had known my brother-in-law Ken, perhaps I would. But I offer you the following as tribute to the way –in Christian love- that we carry each other’s burdens.

We end up carrying about people we never met because people we care about care about them.

I then went on to read a tribute to my brother-in-law Ken who died suddenly last week. You can read the tribute below in a separate blog post. I then concluded with the following:

To our friend Down Under, your earthquake ravaged country is in our prayers. Ben and Henry, you are in our thoughts. And to little Elton and family, please know that we are praying incessantly for your healing. Even if we don’t know these people personally, we end up caring about them, because people we care about, care about them.

We finished our time together by singing along to the Jars of Clay’s version of “They will Know We are Christians by our Love.”