Friday, February 27th

What are the steps we need to take in community? Especially if we want to grow and heal in our faith journey. I think first, confess. Confess the reasons why community is hard and why you don’t want to step into community. Acknowledge the challenges of your own radical

independence, loneliness, busyness, hurry, trauma, and idealism. Ask God to renew a communal spirit in your heart and mind.

Who are your 3 and 12? Who are the ones that you will have the courage to go a little deeper with? Who are the people that you can go and say, “I need you to ….”

We need people in our life that will confront us and comfort us. I need to be challenged, especially if my life is going “off the rails”, can you love me enough to confront me? As well as love me enough to comfort. So many times, we just want the comfort and not the confrontation, but true community does both.

We need people to point out our potential and our pitfalls. I want people to say, “hey, I see this in you and how can we help you fan that into flames. How can you grow in this potential?” I also need people to call out the pitfalls. “Hey Aaron, seems like you are sliding to people pleasing again and the margin in your life is shrinking.” Someone loving me enough to point out my potential and my pitfalls.

We need people to celebrate with and cry with. I’m all for raising a glass to celebrate, but there are times I also need a shoulder to cry on. That happened a few weeks ago, not only with Theresa. But I was sharing some things with Sam, that I was working through with my family of origin and the death of my mom and I just started crying, actually weeping. He was with me, processed with me, pushed me in loving ways to work through that pain. Next day I’m with Matt at Log Cabin in Howards, sharing with him and “out of nowhere” started crying about a similar processing. Middle of a restaurant, crying with another guy. But that’s what I needed, that’s the healing that I needed to share in community.

If you want to do extra credit, take some time, again, with Romans 12. That is a communal passage of how we need people.

Being created in and for community pushes against our radical independence and an answer to our loneliness. Doing the hard work of growing in community pushes against our selfishness and isolation. Healing through community pushes against the brokenness of sin. Not allowing sin to have the last say, but Jesus’ redemptive work of love.

As the community is being formed around you, we look to serve the community beyond you. That’s what Jesus did. He was forming the community around him with the disciples and then sent them out to serve the community beyond them.

That’s why I love the story of feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14). The disciples come to Jesus, in front of the crowds and say, “Jesus, it’s dinner time and we don’t have the resources to feed all these people. Tell them to go home.” Jesus’ response of love and challenge to his community of disciples? “You give them something to eat.” I am forming you into a person of love, we aren’t going to send them away, we are going to love them, but you need to figure it out. “You give them something to eat.”

Jesus is forming us into a people of love, not only to love those around you, but to love those beyond you.

Tyler Staton, in his book Familiar Stranger, shares it this way. ‘A healthy church community, stuck with through disillusionment and stuck with over a long period of time, is an anchor and a filter – an anchor that holds me in God’s presence and a filter that purifies my character from the inside out.”

Let us be a people, an anchor and a filter, of love to our community and beyond.