Reciprocal Actions

Two weeks ago: Rejoice with those who rejoice.

This week's theme: Weep with those who weep.

Each is worthy of a blog post on its own accord, but reality steps in and says they get merged.

This Monday, I'm teaching on the importance of community for one's prayer life.
This weekend, I spent a beautiful day and a half with 10 extraordinary women in a somewhat sketchy hotel, sharing life together.
This past week, I stepped back into life with my Moody community, reminding myself of the beautiful joy of friendships and true relational intimacy.
This coming week, I decide what community I want to be a part of — if I stay in Chicago with the people I have grown to love and appreciate from all over the city or if I'm packing my bags and moving to LA, to live in a co-op with a set of diverse Christians who all mean different things by that word.

Community matters.

Why all this nonsense about community (or all this rehashing of my life), well, partly because I'm a verbal processor and partly because I'm realizing the essential nature of community. Without community, without a network of people who you love and care about, life falls apart. It matters who you rejoice with, who you weep with.

The beauty of authentic community is that while you are sometimes by yourself, you are never alone. The beauty is, that each terrifying step of the way, someone else is going through the motions with you, reciprocating your behaviors, assisting your direction, supporting your decisions. The beauty of community is that it reciprocates. It doesn't merely pour into you, but it needs your support as well.

Community is beautiful and I am blessed to be seeped in it.

I don't know where I'm going with this one, but let's throw in Thomas Merton for good measure:

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved al those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers... It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes terrible mistakes: yet, with all of that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstakes." -- from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander