Thoughts on Community

Hello, Emily here. 

As we transition into the new year that marks the halfway point of our internship year at Horn Creek, I would like to take a bit of time and share with you all that I am currently learning specifically in regards to our community: both the highs and the lows.

Community is a gift, a blessing designed by our Sovereign creator to help us grow in relationship with him.  However it can also be very challenging because it pushes us to look past ourselves and love others with a selfless love. Community can only flourish with this sort of selfless love when the Lord is truly being placed first in priority in each individual’s life because that is where the ability to love stems from- the Lord’s great first love.  When this first love is even partially understood and received by an individual, it is then that the person can respond to that first love with love for the Lord, which can be demonstrated through loving our surrounding community. 

We were made for relationships, with the Lord as well as for one another- our community, the body of Christ: to challenge one another, encourage one another, spur one another on towards Christ and in all things point each other back to him…back to truth to remind one another of the things that we can sometimes so easily forget.  I love Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work; If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”  We need each other, but we must be united through the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Yet as important as community is, it should never be used as a crutch or as a place that we run to before we run to the Lord.  The Lord should always be our center, our place of refuge and rest, from whom we are refreshed, enlivened and granted an abundant life filled with joy and gratitude from being in His presence. For he alone is completely trustworthy and able to meet our needs fully.  He knows what we need even better than we do.  Jeremiah 17:5-8 speaks to this and has been a great encouragement for me, “ This is what the Lord says: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord.  He will be like a bush in he wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes.  He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him.  He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” 

It is out of a place of solitude in which we are able to be filled with life in order to be strengthened to face all that life may throw our way, especially within living in a community of sinful, messy and needy people.  We need to feed the spirit during our time of solitude so that we are able to enter into community, walking in the Spirit so as to live in a way that will glorify the Lord.

It is when the priority lines between solitude and community get blurred that things can get messy. There must be a balance between the two.  I am by no means perfect and have definitely been feeling the tension between sin/flesh and spirit as well as feeling the pain of the sanctification process as I’ve been wrestling with these issues of solitude and community. But praise the Lord for His patience with us as He grows us up in Christ. 

For me, this has been quite the lesson that the Lord has been teaching me.  I have realized that when difficult and painful things arise in this life, my tendency is to look to my community, whether I realize that I am doing so or not.  When responding this way, unspoken expectations can be placed on the community, which can be extremely damaging to the community as a whole, for they are unaware that such expectations are being placed on them.  How in the world can they meet those expectations without knowing about them?  And even if they did know about them, maybe it still wouldn’t be right for me to expect some of those things from them, because of the need to depend on the Lord first through surrendering my burdens to him and waiting upon him to answer and bring healing.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think community is a powerful tool that the Lord uses to show his love and comfort to his people in a physical way because sometimes it can be difficult to feel that from an invisible yet ever present Lord.  It is important to keep perspective that our surrounding community is but a limited physical manifestation of the Lord’s love stemming from a deeper place of the Lord’s perfect and unconditional love.  The Lord uses community so that we can teach each other, comfort each other and love each other in tangible ways… to be His hands, His feet, and his hugs.

This has been a hard lesson for us all to learn as a community, as we are still figuring out what exactly this balance looks like lived out for us as interns up at Horn creek.   Although tough, this process has been a refining process indeed and I am excited to see how the Lord continues to use each of us in one another’s lives as we seek to know Christ more and point each other towards Him. 

I will leave you with a great quote from Bonhoeffer that sheds great insight on this subject of community, “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community.  He will only do harm to himself and to the community… But the reverse is also true.  Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.  Into the community you were called, the call was not meant for you alone; in the community of the called you bear your cross, you struggle, you pray.  We recognize, then, that only as we are within the fellowship can we be alone, and only he that is alone can live in the fellowship.”