Community, a larger fractal

This weekend Larry and I travelled south. A two/two and a half hour drive, for an overnight stay, into the places that GPS devices have a hard time following and the bugs seem to be so desirous of leaving that they will attach themselves to your vehicle to be sure they go home with you. A pity, I suppose, that they never survive the attaching process.

A lovely place. A family campsite on a lake where God has placed another prophet/teacher combo for a time and a season and put it on their heart to open the place up for retreats, etc.

So we retreated with a few people we knew and several we didn't.

San Diego, Boston and Milwaukee (?) were there. Oh yes, and Dallas.

This circumstance played in to my thoughts about community.

Firstly - as one told her story I caught the fact that God had joined them together with a certain group of people about 9 years ago. That was the same time period in which he joined together the group of people that we have laid some claim to as our spiritual family.

Hmmm I thought. Was that perhaps a season of joinings going on everywhere? I know the same soaking meetings that we were having at the time were going on everywhere. I have no answer to that unless more info comes in. I also consider that our joining with our KC group happened a few years later. We'll see what the evidence shows (shades of CSI - did you get it?) and deal with that later. Maybe it's a season we're still in.

Almost as part of that same conversation a guy from San Diego asked me what I saw for me and Larry and for the body. As I was answering him my picture of the community dynamic happening in the body of Christ began to enlarge and I was able to see (much like a vision from several years ago) not just people being joined to one another but communities adding to communities.

I see the fractal/family/garden in a bigger picture.

Let us forsake not the assembling of the body as the manner of some is.

• Let us not let the various languages and dialects that we speak cause us to stop speaking.....
• Let us not allow our differing paradigms put up unnecessary walls....
• Let us not give in to impulses to run from the itchiness of new organic matter being introduced....
• Let us not so crave comfort and ease that we allow the discomfort of growing and becoming to put us off from the appointed joinings of God.

Grace Grace is my cry for the Lord's Body.

We are his body of many parts in the process of becoming fitly joined together.

Our flesh may not want this but our spirit cries out for it.

Grace Grace Father - for we know not what we do but we must learn to love because it is by our love for each other that "they" will know us as your disciples.