Family

We're doing a series on 'Community' at church this month. We also spoke about it at bible study the other day. When we were asked what community was, i knew exactly what it was to me - family. A group of people who love each other unconditionally, can fight like crazy and be fine the very next day, who laugh and cry together and can spend hours on end together without getting bored. A community should be a group of people who mesh together, despite different interestes and personalities, because they have a common goal - like growing closer to God or helping the community become a better place. You should be totally comfortable there, to be yourself, to be happy or angry or totally nuts - whatever, because a community should accept you exactly as you are and use the way that you are toward the greater purpose.

We had a great sermon tonight from Mr.Music (who, by the way, did a great job) - he said that statistics show that people have far less close friends that they used to, far less communal support. The idea that people watch shows like Friends, or Gilmore Girls, or Ally McBeal because they like the sense of community that it illustrates. People fill a hole in their lives with the lives of fictional characters whom they envy. Shows like these have groups of people with amazing support networks, close companionship, lives together - deep down, this is what people want from life, but are no longer getting.

I suppose that i belong to two different communities; my church and my friends. My church community does a reasonably job of fitting those parameters i mentioned earlier, or at least tries to, we make a concerted effort to strive for something similar to that. Everytime we're together, we know that a community is what we want and we really try to make it work.

It's a little different with my friends; we've got a different focus. We don't have a common goal, like growing towards anything. There's no specific reason to spend time with each other, other than for a sense of enjoyment. When that goes AWOL, even temporarily, we have to work quickly to fix it before time passes and we don't have a strong enough tie to stay together anymore. We have to WANT to be together, to be each other's family. Without that, we become part of those statistics, with an ever decreasing number of people in our emotional family. The feeling of losing that community is one of the worst feeling ever, but it can be fixed, if people want to fix it.

There's nothing i want more in life than to belong to communities that meet the my definition of community. I envy the relationships that people have in shows like Sex and the City, Melrose Place or One Tree Hill. It's difficult to find that, to achieve that. I'm not big on the family-community, so it's the friends and church communities that i need to keep me sane.

Community is complicated. But i'm glad that God decided that it was so important, because that means we can work on it and be achieving his plans at the same time; being part of a strong community will help keep us all happy.