Before email and text messages, most written correspondence was done through letters. Unlike modern forms of communication, letters didn’t come with a thread of what had already been said by the other person. Reading another person’s letter only gives us a portion of the full story. Third John, the shortest book in the Bible, is more like a postcard written by John to a man named Gaius. While we can’t know everything that was going on in Gaius’s church, this little letter offers the modern church several important lessons.