Happy New Year to you all. I pray you have the most blessed year ever!

A new year is a great time to reevaluate where you are in relationship to where you hoped to be by the end of the previous year. Did you reach your goals? Did you stay on track or did you stray off and miss the mark? It’s a good time for a non-profit, like Love INC, to check out if we have stayed true to our mission.

Just as a report to you, I feel Love INC has stayed true to our local mission of mobilizing churches to work with area service providers to meet unmet needs in our community. But National Love INC has a broader mission, which is to mobilize churches to change lives and communities with love in the name of Christ. I feel that locally we haven’t done as well meeting that larger mission, and this is probably a clue to me that I need to change some priorities in my life. As a leader, I help guide Love INC, and so I need to check out my priorities in the light of a Christian worldview.

Priority number one needs to be loving the Lord first.

Matthew 22:37-38 says, “Jesus replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.’” Priority number two is to love people. Matthew 39 goes on quoting Jesus who said, “A second [commandment] is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

So if I put helping people first, above all things, which I do make as a priority, then something is off. I see that I personally need to do some realignment. Loving God is more important than loving man, and loving the Gospel is more important than helping the poor.

Loving others and helping the poor is always going to be a big priority in my life, and I will keep moving in that direction in my private life as well as in my workplace, but I need to make that priority just below, not above, my priority to be ready to share the love of Jesus with others. It makes sense, right? If I love others, which I do, then I should share with them the thing I prize most, and certainly the value of the Gospel exceeds the value of any financial or physical help I can provide. Does that mean I won’t work as hard to help met the unmet physical needs of the needy in our community. Absolutely not. Does that mean I think Love INC should change focus on mobilizing churches to meet physical and financial needs? No way, that would be too silly to contemplate, and in truth I hope we can meet even more needs this year.

What I mean is that I need to push harder to combine the two most important things in my personal life and in my professional life to help people with more than I have been doing. So, in 2022 I have set a goal to do better and to put my priorities in the right order. I hope as the year progresses you can help me, and join with me, to help others in all the right ways. Happy New Year, and let’s get to work!

Patricia Jones is Executive Director of Love INC of the Yampa Valley. She can be reached at loveincpat@yahoo.com.