community

"Seriously now - how often have you seen this sort of intimate community work? It is rare. Because it is hard, and it is fiercely opposed. The Enemy hates this sort of thing; he knows how powerful it can be, for God and his kingdom. For our hearts. It is devastating to him. Remember divide and conquer? Most churches survive because everyone keeps a polite distance from the others. We keep our meetings short, our conversations superficial. 'So, Ted, how's everything going on the Stewardship Committee?' 'Oh, just great, Nancy. We've got a big goal to reach this year, but I think we'll be able to get that gym after all.' No one is really being set free, but no one is really at odds with each other, either. We have settled for safety in numbers - a comfortable, anonymous distance. An army that keeps meeting for briefings, but never breaks into platoons and goes to war.

Living in community is like camping together. For a month. In the desert. Without tents. All your stuff is scattered out there for everyone to see. C'mon - anybody can look captured for Christ an hour a week, from a distance, in his Sunday best. But your life is open to those you live in community with. Some philosopher described it like a pack of porcupines on a winter night. You come together because of the cold, and you are forced apart because of the spines. Here we go again. Why does Jim always have to be discouraged? I'm sick of encouraging him. And what is it with Mary and her inability to stop talking about herself? Why is Brian always so guarded? These people bug me."
- "Waking the Dead," John Eldredge

I've had those thoughts cross my mind at the bottom quite a few times. And it makes me happy, because it gives me hope that the church I'm in isn't devoid of community - that we are living life together and learning. Perhaps it's just because we're in college and that's what college is like.

But either way, I know that I'm not predisposed to putting my stuff out there for everyone to see. In fact, I try my best to smother it and hide it. Yet I'm finding that people can see me for who I am - and sometimes who I am is a person hiding his junk somewhere, and everyone knows it, but no one will talk about it because I don't want to talk about it. And once in a while, out of the blue, someone will knock it out of me and thank God they did because that's exactly what I needed.

This book describes a lot of different things and I'm not sure what to think of it all, but I can't think of any better way to describe church than a community living life together - rather like the Fellowship of the Ring. And it's kinda cheesy, but it's definitely true that we are people with a common purpose, fighting a war and we have each others' backs.