The Power of Community
My life has been marked by exposure to great communities of people. There's almost nothing I love more in life than the feeling of being unified with a group of like-minded people, even if our common goal is something insignificant, like the pursuit of coffee in the morning.
When I was in junior high, we had a pastor who transformed our church by his love and teaching on worship. Pastor Bo was a gifted musician, and some of my favorite times were when he took to the piano and led us in songs of high praise. I came to love the presence of God during those years and I have memories of our youth group snuggled together sitting in the dark worshiping God with everything in us. We were a tight group, drawn together by songs of the King.
In high school, one of the local youth pastors gathered a city-wide ecumenical youth group together. With some incredible worship and the help of the Holy Spirit, a ragtag army of radical Jesus-chasers was formed, and I spent my last 3 years of high school hanging out with this strange mix of popular kids, leaders, newly saved druggies, outcasts, and nerds who were learning to follow Jesus. We could not have been more different truly, but somehow being wrecked by God was all the glue we needed to keep the fellowship going.
Because of my time in these God-chasing communities of my youth I entered adulthood having communed with God at a deep level. I knew what it was like to hear His voice and I knew what it was like to fast for a week with my friends fasting beside me. I had asked the Holy Spirit to teach me how to pray and HE DID. These experiences came from being around others and likely would not have happened without their direct influence.
While I have no doubt that God is big enough to have "grown me up" on His own, I think he rarely chooses to develop His people in isolation.
In the sport of Crossfit, everyone does the same workout called a WOD which stands for Workout Of the Day. You are competing against yourself to do your best time, and your best reps, but doing it with people around forces you to work a little harder, push a little longer and ultimately perform better than you would if you were at home by yourself doing the same workout.
Being in community does the same thing for us spiritually. We spur one another on to good works. We check each other when our egos get too big, or our victim mentalities overtake our better sense. And when the weight we are trying to lift is too heavy, our brothers and sisters can spot us and lift the weight off of us until we can bear it on our own.
I tend to idealize community. I know it. Because living life in community honestly is tough work. Living in community and staying put when others leave, or (sometimes even worse) STAY! is tough. We hurt each other often as much as we help each other. For each member who feels smack dab in the middle of the group and loved and nestled in, there's someone else feeling on the fringes and left out. There are varying levels of influence and status and ever shifting loyalties. Relationships--true ones anyway---are messy. So a whole network of relationships are messy too.
But man when those Kum Bah Yah moments come; in moments of celebration, in moments of awe and wonder; when the larger family is gathered around the table and all the hearts in the room beat as one? WHAT IS BETTER THAN THAT?
I can't think of much else.