For years and years I heard the word "community" around me. I heard it in church. I heard it at school. I even heard it in the workplace. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever had a great definition of the word. I considered community as just a collection of people around me. Now I see it as a collection of people I am intimately connected with. It's quite amazing.
We were meant to be closely... intimately... connected with people. Not in the "you're having a hard time in life so I brought you a casserole" kind of way. But in such a way that people really know what's going on in your life and you have nothing to hide. We are meant to be in a community that supports each other no matter what. That's right... no matter what. I don't recall ever being a part of such a community before; at least not until we stepped into a great church almost 7 years ago. We stepped into a community that surrounds us, loves us, laughs with us, cries with us, calls us up, calls us out, and cares for us. My tangible reminder is my daughter and the other children of the church. About 4 years ago a friend of our's called us at 8:30 one night to ask if their daughter could spend the night with us. The mother was involved in something that would go late into the night and an emergency came up that the father had to attend to. We said that their daughter could of course stay with us. In that moment it occurred to me that our friend could easily call us for this (what could appear to be a large) request, and that we could easily have said no because of inconvenience. The beauty of a solid, God-honoring community is that you will easily support each other without the fear of offense or inconvenience. We are connected to several families that if we ever need someone to watch our daughter, we know that we can easily call them and they know they can easily call us.
I'm not 100% sure that God will keep us in this church for the rest of our lives. What I do know is that if He ever calls us to another church, it will be so hard to go because of the connection we have with this community. It is truly like nothing else I have ever experienced.
