It's been one of the great joys and pleasures of my life to plant and help pastor the Evergreen Community- not because it's a perfect community, but because it's not.
It's in our "in-processness" that God most shows up (the way the apostle Paul put it is "His grace is perfected in our weakness.") In those moments when we are not the community we hope to be, when our patience with each other is short, when we are struggling just to show up, much less to serve each other- that's when we 1. realize how much we need Jesus and 2. stop leaning on our own coolness and ability to put together a rad community and start crying out to God to show up and make something Kingdom-like in our midst.
Yeah- we're going to annoy the crap out of each other. You are going to hear some bad sermons. Someone will say something stupid on the City or even to your face. People will forget your birthday and occasionally not show up when you need them. It's how community works because it's how life works. But what's present in community that is so often missing from life is... Grace. The very thing that seems to flower and bloom not in our successes but in our failures.
I don't say any of this to encourage you to fail each other or to take community as anything less than the serious commitment it needs to be. BUT- I do hope that in those moments when the sting of friction or restlessness or dissatisfaction seems most potent, you will begin to process it all with the question: what would it look like for the grace of God to show up here? And how should that change my response to this frustration?
Learning from the hard parts of life (and community!) doesn't happen automatically. It takes great intention on our part. The intention to see Jesus even in the crappiest parts of life and ask God: "What do You want to do here?"
And then listen.
Bob, this post was great. Spot on. I don't have anything to add but i feel like it deserves a comment!
Posted by: Todd Hiestand | June 16, 2010 at 08:06 PM