Community & Commitment
A group of our Hope Heals Campers, spending an afternoon commiserating about and rejoicing in their good/hard stories
“We can be present to the pain of others because Jesus is present in ours.”
Suffer Strong, “Redefining Community: The Power of ‘We’”
Community is a buzzy word these days. Churches, gyms, social media influencers, and marketers set community-building within their audiences as a keystone metric, with varying end goals and degrees of integrity. This technique often proves fruitful because community is a profound and deep-seated human need that provides security and satisfaction for us, both bodily and spiritually.
In our modern times, community looks less like an ecosystem of homes, farms, shops, and places of worship than it does a forum to be known and loved, no matter what. We long to invite other people into the deepest parts of ourselves, but we’re often unwilling to invest the time and emotional energy to engage the deepest parts of other people, especially those people who look different from us or think in ways we don’t understand. Community is predicated on commitment, which seems to be an increasingly scarce resource.
Simply put, a community thrives when we are committed to showing up.
Showing up can be literal and physical, like having regular meals with friends, prioritizing time with your family when work is demanding your attention, or using a Saturday to serve a cause you love. But showing up can also be relational, like reliably FaceTiming your grandfather every week or earnestly listening to a person’s perspective in order to learn, rather than to argue. Showing up is taxing work, but the return on the investment is invaluable.
Integration into a healthy network of relationships will mean celebrating with your community, but it also means grieving and disagreeing and sacrificing within your community. By Jesus’s example, life-giving community can never be constrained to like-minded folks or the socially acceptable crowd.
A commitment to community is actually a commitment to indiscriminate compassion fueled by unstoppable goodwill.
Christ-like community is neither incidental nor accidental. It requires the intentional surrender of our time, money, comfort, and emotional energy in the interest of contributing to the healing of our neighbors and, ultimately, the healing of the world. Commitment to community is our divinely-designed, earth-bound facsimile of Jesus' sacrifice for and loyalty to an undeserving human race. He shows up for us, no matter the circumstance.
A Benediction: God, I recognize that my greatest commodity is my attention. Help me live from a place of abundance, rather than scarcity, so that I can give generously of my attention, energy, and gifts to the people around me. You’ve placed me in this family and this community of friends for a reason. You are a triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—built on the foundation of relationship, which means I am built on the same foundation. Cultivate in me a willingness and readiness to contribute my best to my family, friendships, and global community so that your kingdom of love can expand a little bit further.
Inspired by 1 Peter 4:8-11
