Community can be an elusive goal, a moving target. Really living in community with others doesn’t come as naturally as proximity and it certainly comes with loss, heartache, and a lot of work.
For years, I thought of community as something that was built into the church. I mean, we are called the Body of Christ. We are all supposed to be part of the same living, breathing organism. That comes naturally, right?
I glimpsed real moments of community in a small group that lived our lives all tangles up with each other. All these young married couples were clueless as we navigated births and deaths, faith and lack thereof. Life was a mess of baby showers (one every other month the year we added about seven babies into the midst), birthdays, and snatches of prayer caught in the moments the little ones were playing.
Then the anchor of our little group moved away and we fell into disarray, tumbling out of community and groping in the dark for something that looked like what we had known before.
I knew there was a hunger in me for someone to really see me, a loneliness I couldn’t put my finger on. I didn’t realize how deeply it ran or how universal this longing really is until last week.
When I stepped into the home of a friend I’d only known online for the past year, a relationship grew deeper but I also realized that the foundation was already there. We met through a collaborative blog she founded and we have chatted over email and facebook, texts and through the words of our lives we put out there online for all to read.
I fell right into her life - picking up her daughter from school, meeting those she lives life with, and sharing our hearts over dinner. Hearing her words straight from her, instead of on a screen, and hugging her neck made the friendship so much sweeter. But I realized that community already existed there. She already knew me.
I expected an awkwardness in online relationships becoming real at the Festival of Faith and Writing when I met dozens of people that have only been bio pictures on a screen to me before. I found community instead, people longing to know and be known just like I was.
Maybe it is something about writers – how we can’t do small talk because we lay our lives bare in our words for all to read anyway. But we moved right into spiritual conversations and sharing our struggles, our hopes, and fears. There were tears and laughter over late nights because we just didn’t want it to end.
In several panels I heard writers talk about their blogs as their homes – places they build community. Leslie Leyland Fields talked about her blog being a place where she can invite people into her home, saying because of it she lives “in a bigger house with open windows.”
I realized these places I visit online are people’s homes, that social media (flawed as it is with false selves and picking fights) has built a global Body of Christ that I couldn’t truly see until it became flesh for me.
Back at home this week, I dove back into writing for my home – my own little corner of the internet. Comments came in and I realized I have a little community right here. Voices of my friends waited for me on Voxer and their words flowed in text messages, across facebook and twitter, emails and on blogs.
I also sat across several tables this week with members of my little group, scattered and gathered back together in different ways. We don’t look the same as we used to but our lives are still tangled up together.
I made space by getting up at 5 am, a long breakfast with an old friend before work. We shamelessly prayed in the middle of all the people bustling around us, grabbing their breakfast before heading off into their day.
I looked at her and said, “This is the church. Right here, we are it right here and now.” Continue Reading
I was painfully shy when I was young, unable to even take a bottle from my aunt. She had to leave it for me in an empty room before I would gather up enough courage to go retrieve it. I got over that shyness and most people would call me a “people person.”
Those people never know the fear underneath the surface, the way I struggle with each interaction to fight the desire to please everyone, scared of what others think of me. In the past I have let this fear disable me completely.
But in my writing I can be bold and brave.
There is also this magical thing called editing. I can take back my initially clumsy words, make sure my ideas are fully formed, my prose beautifully expressed.
I wish there was the ability to edit what comes out of my mouth, to hide my fearful eyes behind a screen so people can’t really see.
But then that isn’t really being known, is it?
In a year already full of exciting and scary adventures, I am about to embark on another trip that has me equally thrilled and frightened.
A week from today I will be heading out to Grand Rapids, Michigan for The Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. It is a gathering that happens every two years which brings together speakers and writers to discuss issues of “faith, ethics, justice, and the craft of storytelling.”
The over 61-page program I have been perusing highlighting the speakers, workshops, dinners, and networking times with writing industry professions has me reeling. I have a list already two pages long of people I hope to meet in the four-day period of the festival.
Many of these are people who I feel like I have gotten to know over the past couple years. I have read their words and peeked into the deep recesses of their lives, but not seen their faces outside of a photo on a computer screen.
These are people I have let know me as well as I have been vulnerable, poured my deepest feelings out onto the page and sent them out into the world.
There are writers alongside me in the Redbud Writer’s Guild, The Mudroom, and SheLoves Magazine (the three most frequent places I read and write). These ladies have prayed with me, counseled me, spurred me on when I was ready to give up, and shared the dark and scary parts of sharing your faith on the page with me.
Up until now they have been two-dimensional. Now they are going to become flesh. Continue Reading
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