Well as you will see again, this Mini Mission Trip has had a profound impact on my life and discernment of community. Like I mentioned yesterday this Mission trip in some respects allowed us an opportunity to enter into a community together. It provided an opportunity – for us to enter into a shared life. We worked, lived, ate, played, prayed, & shared expenses. And that is a beautiful thing, which I enjoyed immensely. However I also realized that just because the opportunity for community was there in structure, it didn’t mean that I was always partaking in communal life. And on the other hand if the structure of community was not in place there would have been no communal life there for me to take part of.
Hopefully as I continue, this realization will become clearer.
Most of the week, for me was awesome and fun and I was having a good ol time with everyone. One major exception to this was Wednesday. The weather was unpleasant all day and the work proved to hard cold and dirty. I was crabby and then I was short with my friends around me. Then I was frustrated with the fact that I become crabby so easily if I am uncomfortable. I just sort of checked out from the community around me. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone and said hardly anything while we got ready for dinner and ate dinner. I just didn’t want to be there, and boy I made it obvious in my demeanor.
Later reflecting and talking with my wife, I saw how I acted was really disrespectful and uncharitable to those around me. I am sorry for how I acted, but in further reflection I came to realized something about community and about my nature.
I realized 1) That as beautiful and as contagious as community is it also takes effort and at sometimes it will take huge amounts of effort to enter into the opportunity of community that is before me. 2) I have a strong desire to be an individual and the community in structure and practice needs to allow space for individuals.
The images that came to mind are 1)Each person joining the community is a play doh person and when you join we take your lump of play doh and add it to the community play doh person so that the community becomes this one giant play doh person. 2) Each person joining the community is a person made out of the stuff that is a person and we then put up four walls and a roof around us and we call the community HOME. Whereas the house is the structure & order & traditions of the community. And the people inside are the people inside the community. This HOME we build has windows and doors for us to go in and out of and a front porch for us to invite the neighbors to hang out and the doors are unlocked and the windows uncurtained. So the HOME is tangible and something real and a part of the persons’ identity and design and yet the HOME is separate from each individual and each individual is separate from the other individuals.
In summary:
1) The Community needs to respect the individual and provide true freedom to remain persons
2) Each individual needs to put in effort and at times great effort to get outside themselves in order to enter into the communal life and benefit the entire community
This is an interesting post, John. Thanks for sharing these thoughts with the community. After reflecting briefly upon what you wrote, I am instantly directed to the Church and how She is made up of individuals, each adding their own unique element to make up the body of Christ, this big body of believers that we have and are a part of today. Also, what you mentioned about how each individual needs to put in effort (at times outside themselves) in order to truly enter into the community and benefit everyone can be applied to the Church as well, and this is definitely one of the desires of my heart to begin trying to impart upon others that I meet. It is important, too, to recognize the structure and traditions laid out before us within this community of the Church lest we begin to create our own ideas of what the "Church" actually is. Sometimes we shield our eyes from the beauty of the Church and rather than sacrificing to grow in the Lord we can all be accused of painting our own images of what "community life in the Church" should look like, always searching for and creating our own "churches" within ourselves. These are just random thoughts but came to mind after reading your post. Thanks for sharing, John!
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