Eliot hanging out at Willowtree
By Eliot Kim (Outreach Worker at Willowtree)
As I think about my life at this very moment, I am thankful for the different communities that I am involved with. My community of friends, church community, TCM staff and the sites that we work in have all been blessings. Lately, I’ve been really humbled in truly understanding what God says about community rather than what I think it should be. In my own personal life, I’ve struggled with my own idea of what a community should look like and be like, and the ways it could benefit me instead of flipping that question around and asking myself, what more can I do for my community? I’ve learned that when we have such selfish thoughts about what we think a community should like it, we could in turn, end up destroying the community itself or distance ourselves from it. Destroying may seem like a harsh word (well it is hehe), but there is great potential to bring more harm than good when we think and act selfishly. In saying and thinking all these things, I brought myself back to Scripture. A couple of years ago, our small group started memorizing weekly bible verses, which is an awesome exercise. Growing up in a Korean church, we used to have a lot of memory verse competitions and I stopped memorizing verses after that, but it was cool to go back to childhood exercises (by the way, this should be a lifelong exercise folks!). One of the verses I had to memorize was from Philippians 2:3-16 which says “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interest of others.” Even Jesus came to Earth and brought himself to our level and humbled himself. For it is God who works in all of us for His purpose as he did with his Son. This simply encouraged me to love others and those that are in my community. It also filled me with greater joy, which is a good consequence of having a relationship with God. Our task is simple: to love and to serve each other. God has been so good to us and I find that I could only respond to his calling with humility. Thanks for setting the example God! Props to Him.