More thoughts on community

What is community?

Living, bleeding, breathing life...together. Walking through gardens arm-in-arm, pointing out every beautiful flower, each turning leaf. Exposing life together. Punching through walls, shattering mirrors, and baring scars. Destroying the idea that each one of us is an atlas, straining and sweating to balance the weight of the world, alone, on our shoulders. Holding buckets to catch the tears; collecting and pouring them over the soil of our souls. Growing and blossoming, changing colors and falling, living and moving...together.

This quote is from a young lady - 19? 20? - I'm not sure. Her name is Alec and she and her mother had a discussion about community. They explored the question and she wrote her definition and her mom sent it to several of us that she knows are exploring this same question.

And if you by chance don't know anything of her story and think she is too young to have insight - let me just say that the little knowledge that I have assures me she as well versed in the pain of life as are so so so many of the children in this country and this world.

I love how she wrote it. This bunch of people that I'm thinking about in particular this day became connected through divine appointments and common pursuing of God. Larry and I can tell our own stories of getting connected. It was a marvelous time. 1999. 2000. (I need to make a correction here. Two have reminded me - it was actually 1997 when Larry and I first connected with the people that have become our spiritual family. There was a couple of moves for Larry and me in the years between and in my mind it seems that the connecting started when we left the job that moved us around and we ended up in WM. So that's the time table that sticks in my head. Sometimes we tell our memory what to remember.) Even though God brought us together with them it was three - yes three - years before I knew that I knew that this was the family God had connected me to. Some I seldom see but I always feel the connection. I was once again a part of something bigger than myself. Since the beginning there have been ups and downs - doing things together and separately. There came the point that we were as "parts lying on the ground".

But Father has been pulling us back together. Helping us to stand up again. There is a shared history now. We are connected by more than the common interests. We share more than just good times in the Lord. There is love here. And as we grow in this "community" of people I find that Alec's quote is very appropriate. Genuine caring for the stuff of each other's life without the need to dictate or interfere.

We're questioning. We're probing the depths of this idea. We cannot define it. We dare not. And yet Alec did it without doing it. Read her words. Examine her phrases. Don't just look at the beauty and power of the expression and get lost in the abstract. It's not something we do - it's what we are in God's today expression of Himself through the Son that dwells in us.

Look at your own community.... your family..... your marriage. These are the places where this is lived out in it's greatest intensity. Tough decisions have to be made. Confrontation might have to happen.

What to do after?

Show up.

Show up.

Divorce is not an option. (This little nugget came from a marriage that included at least one escapist but God in his wisdom early on took that option out. The marriage has survived and flourished.)

Show up.

The Word of God is chock full of what to do's but the how to's are where we stumble. How to love? How to lay down my life? How to love the one that is hurting me. How to confront if necessary. How to know IF such as that is necessary? And is it YOURS to do? How to allow the other their joys and triumphs with out envy and one-upmanship? How to overcome that part of me that just CANNOT allow Jesus his expression of life and love.

Well.

That's where the cross comes in to play. Recognition. Repentance. Taking ownership rather than blameshifting. Times of refreshing for our own spirits and souls as we come out from under the self stuff that weighs us down and allows that enemy to steal, kill and destroy.

We must get unstuck from the abstract beauty of the ideas of community and brotherly love and be willing to walk through bloody messes at times. The rubber of our shoe bottoms must meet the road of life's realities.

Forgiveness. Setting ourselves free from that which wounded us. To see this as our response to the one who wounded is to stop far short of it's power. It is our response to the God who requires it of us. Yes, requires. If we can't then we repent of our inability. We forgive so that HE can set us and the wounder free from each other. Then we are both free to receive HIS judgement and healing.

I watched a movie called Invincible about Vince Papale who left the neighborhood in Philly to become an Eagle (yessss - football). I loved watching the dynamic of community and relationship in that movie and recommend it to anyone who would care to watch it.

My heart sings in prayer today for all those that God has given to Larry and I throughout our journey - beginning with our children, who are our heart of hearts.

We contend for this reality that we cannot define.