Community

I’ve been thinking about the idea of community a lot lately – mostly because I notice a huge lack of it in my life. I came from a place that had a great sense of biblical community; it was actually a core value. And I know that was largely due to the leadership placing value on that and instilling it in people. I’ve never been on of those people that makes friends really easily – I just don’t have that outgoing sanguine personality, but I do LOVE people. I love being with people and doing things together – living life together. You know, community.

It’s challenging moving to a new place where everyone has their own sense of community, and you’re the new kid coming into that. It’s also challenging navigating this whole new thing of “being married” and figuring out alone time, couple time, individual friend time, couple friend time….my this is starting to sound like a counseling session! 😉 After a few months of being sad about my lack of community I finally got over myself and remembered what a good friend, Jessica Jackson, used to always tell me, “if you want friends, you need to be friendly”. In other words, I need to stop waiting for other people to reach out to me and be the one to initiate relationships – again, not my strong suit, but so worth it.

There is such strength and life to being in community with others of like mind and heart – it encourages growth, accountability, fun and reminds us we are not little islands unto ourselves – which is easy to forget when all that’s in our world is just us. I know I have a definite tendency toward that when I don’t have enough other people in my life, and that is not the person I want to be.

It’s so easy to point and say that other people should be the ones to change, the ones to do this or do that, but the simple fact of the matter is we can’t make anyone do anything other than ourselves. And I for one and tired of waiting for things to change – like it’s this mythical process that will one day “happen”. I am going to be the change I want to see – maybe it will catch on, maybe it won’t. But at least I can know that I have stopped being the victim and started taking responsibility for my own happiness/needs/etc.

I want community in my life not only to minister to me, but also so I can be a minister to others. It’s time to stop “waiting on the world to change” (as John Mayer sings) and go out and bring change into my world.