I’ve been thinking a lot about community.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about words that didn’t use to have meaning to me but now are part of my everyday vocabulary and that is one of them.
Community? it’s a safe assumption to say that we all get that the definition is a group of people living together under shared principles like your apartment complex or your block or whatever verbiage you want to interchange there.
But what does it REALLY mean, what does it really look like?
I don’t want to get too existential but I kind of do.
In terms of Christianity, we weren’t created to be alone.
Eccl. 4:9-12 in summation is that two are better than one.
1 Peter 4:8-11 says to serve and love one another (condensed as well)
Beyond The Bible, tapping into what it feels like to REALLY be alone….it sucks.
But some people go through life without ever experiencing true community.
From my scope, I see American society turning inwards to an accepted form of isolation.
What do I mean by that?
We get up, we go to work, we go to school, we may see a couple people we know but then we go home, we get on our phones, we turn on the television and we go to sleep. Sure we’re not REALLY alone, but I can recall days where I didn’t look a single person in their eyes or maybe I avoided all forms of communication for an entire day.
One day of that is okay but for some of us that’s every single day, or the majority of our days. Whether or not you consider yourself to be introverted or extroverted, we still crave some form of human interaction – even if it’s just someone noticing that we are taking up space in a room.
What am I trying to say though?
Community, TRUE community is so much more. Do you have someone who is going to tell you when you’re being crass, rude or making things harder for yourself? Do you have someone you can call no matter the problem and they’ll take you to get coffee or bring over wine? Do you have people who want to take on your daily burdens to lighten your load?
Some of us have friends and family, but sometimes those are just hollow words.
One of my strengths is extreme empathy – this is something that feeds into a gift of hosting and welcoming people to make sure they feel loved and comfortable in any setting. It’s a strength of mine because it seemed like a deficiency in my life for a number of years. Sometimes that’s how we develop some of our best skills though.
Up until last week no one asked my WHY I want to do this – why I want to uproot myself, throw all of my finances in, fundraise and give up everything I’ve earned and worked for during those 11 months but all of this, this post, is why.
Not only will I be living in close quarters with a small group of people for this 11 months, each country we get to spend enough time to invest and LEARN what community was meant to be like with pointed individual strengths and reliance on other people to help you flourish as a person and as a tribe, essentially.
That is MY calling: to learn how to cultivate community from the most basic aspect of human existence – through love and support and hard work.
I don’t know what God wants me to see or to bring back, but I know it’s going to be the solution to a problem one day.
