Community

A friend of mine has recently moved into a new house.  It’s closer to the children’s school so the family doesn’t have to wake up so early in the morning and there are no school runs to do with the  car.  There’s more space with an extra couple of rooms so people can spread out and not feel like they are tripping over one another.  Some of the plants from the garden also made the move with them.

I’m thinking about what I will buy as a house warming present.  It has been a while since any of my friends have moved anywhere.  We are a settled bunch. 

When my husband and I moved into our first house we were given a Visitor’s Book for people to sign.  It seemed to be the essential thing a house needed in the early days when the church was first planted in the late 1980s.  Everyone’s home had one.

I am not sure that there wasn’t some kind of unspoken competition going on.  Not just how many visitors, or how often they signed the book but also the “who”.  There were people who rated higher than others.  There might have been bonus points for unknown names – the true strangers who could have been angels in disguise, as against the usual names who couldn’t possibly angels at all! I don’t know where our visitor’s book is.

I am vaguely thinking about buying my friend a visitor’s book.  Will they see it as a hint that we want to be invited round?  Will they see something implied in it that I don’t think they are sociable enough? I just might go with a potted plant instead.

Day 22 with Bonhoeffer is all about community.  (It’s actually Day 26 if we’re counting from the day I signed up to the studies but, as ever, I’m in catch-up mode.) He reminds me that God never designed me to be a solitary figure but always in community.  Bonhoeffer doesn’t know that I have a hermit mentality but, it he did, he would still be telling me that I need to be in community.  God’s heart has always been for a people, not merely a single person.  Christ’s body is BODY not body part.  In the beginning in Genesis God said that it wasn’t good for man to be alone and created companionship and helpers.  He expects us to be our brother’s keeper. We support and are supported by our Cristian community.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think that people just get in the way.  God and I get along really well together.  When it is just the two of us out fellowship is sweet.  It’s people that throw the spanner into the works.  I was birthed as a Christian into self-sufficiency.  I am the spiritual equivalent to a South American big city street kid who knows how to survive. Making connections, interdependency, relying on or trusting others, or have them relying on or trusting me doesn’t sit easily with me.  Community is good for me because it forces my gaze away from myself and puts it on God and on other people. It gives me the opportunity to be responsible for others and to speak truth into their lives.  It’s important to know that other people have my back and take responsibility for looking after me.

Community is more than just a group of people in the same place.  We can be like marbles in the same jar, making a lot of noise as we connect – but we remain unchanged. We are still the same ball of glass we were when we began.  Better, said someone, to be grapes – bruised by the contact, bleeding juice and staining one another with our encounters. Our willingness to surrender and to give ourselves to others is what makes the Christian community unique.  We need to give what we can’t really afford to give but give it anyway, give because we can’t really afford to hang on to what can meet another’s need and not waiting to some personal disaster in a person’s life to begin to give. 

Next week our church is planning a day retreat at the Abriachan Forest classroom.  We were there around about this time last year. We will be spending the day together being community.  We strive not to make it a highly organised affair and want to balance assigning hours and minutes to one activity or another with just a walk in the forest and time spent chilling out and talking.  

I intend to be a grape and not a marble.

Not a Sparrow or a Glutton

^“If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbour, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat.”  Exodus 12:4

It was the eve of the exodus from Egypt.  God was about to loose the Angel of Death on the Egyptian households.  Pharaoh’s continued hard heart had led to this moment.   Most people are familiar with what happens next.

My husband and I qualify as a small household, which means that if we were part of the Israelite nation at the time we would have been sharing a lamb with our nearest neighbour.  I confess that even with living where we do for the last twenty years we know very little about our nearest neighbour. 

It was not just sharing the lamb with them, but taking into account the number of people there and how much lamb was needed in “accordance with what each person will eat”.  I can just about deal with the numbers.  I know how many children there are having taught more than a few of them.  It is the appetite of each family member that would have me flummoxed.   That kind of knowledge is beyond me.  If it was my neighbour who was providing the lamb it is unlikely they would know how much I or my husband would eat.

God assumed when he gave that instruction to Moses and Aaron that it would present no problems.  The community was close knit.  They lived together in the ghetto that was Goshen.  They had a shared experience of suffering and a shared experience of joy.  They shared the same faith, bruised as it was. They knew exactly how much each person would eat.

Today many of us do not enjoy that kind of close community.  There are some people that make it their business to know everyone else’s business – but I am not one of them.

Take it into the church setting – would that be any better?  I suppose I am lucky that being a part of a small fellowship I have the opportunity to discover my neighbour’s appetites.  Some people I know better than others.  There are some people I more naturally move towards than others.  Others require a little more work to find the things we have in common, or create something on which we can build a relationship.

It requires honesty and openness.  I have begun to think about what people think about me that isn’t true.  And not just what people think about me – but what I think about myself that isn’t true either.  If I think about myself as a victim, for example, I live my life that way and other people see that and see me as a victim too.  If I pick at my food, like a sparrow, in public, but gorge myself in my own home – people see the sparrow, not the glutton.  When the neighbour finds the lamb to share with my household, he provides for the sparrow he sees, not the glutton I hide from him.  He is not able to meet my needs because he doesn’t know what they are.

There have been too many occasions lately where I have not been the “me” I really am.  The “me” I am is not really that quiet and silent.  I am not aloof and unfriendly.  I am shy and take a while to feel at home enough to unlock myself.  I am worth getting to know.  There is wisdom in me that doesn’t always lie on the surface.

If you are buying a lamb to share with me – I am not the sparrow or the glutton but somewhere between.

It's All About the Journey

It was a small scene in a much larger dream that has caught my imagination today. 

The larger dream involved driving the car over a patch of sandy ground with lots of marram grass to cut a corner that had a traffic light.  I have seen people on bikes cut corners all the time, but not people in cars!  The car got stuck in sand and I had to get the bus.

I was in Nairn and the last bus to Inverness had long gone.  There was a bus beside the stop and the bus driver leaned out of the window to tell me he was going to Tore on the Black Isle.  For those that know our local area, the geography at this point breaks down.  To get from Nairn to Tore one would have to go through Inverness – but you know what dreams are like.  He told me that there were busses every half hour from Tore to Inverness.

I got on the bus, bought my ticket and sat down.

“So, you are trying to get to Inverness?  There are busses from Tore to Inverness every half hour.”  It was a nice young man standing next to me.  He was repeating basically what the driver had told me.

“You’ll have a half hour wait,” said another passenger.  He was quite a burly chap. “If you visit the Tore Arms bar, you have time to hear my band play.”

“He’s the drummer,” added another voice.

“It’s a rotten band, mind…”

The banter on the bus was really friendly.  It turned out a woman on the bus was in charge of the light buffet and began asking people to do little things for her like collect the paper plates and plastic spoons from the shop.  She also checked whether anyone minded but she was planning the use the spicy recipe for the chicken drumsticks.

A boy on the bus asked if anyone could help him with his homework.

It wasn’t a quiet bus.  No one disappeared behind a newspaper or a book cover.  No one searched for an empty seat all by themselves.  It was a collection of people who knew each other well to the point of teasing one another.

We piled off the bus at Tore, outside the Tore Arms bar.  There was a collection of people milling around outside.  Some of them were the band members with their musical instruments in cases.  They waved to the bus driver as he left.

There was lots of conversation beside the door of the Tore Arms bar.  No one seemed to be in a hurry to set up for the band or sort the buffet.  They stood beside the door and chatted.  It was not a warm night, but with all the people by the door, it felt warm. 

Someone spotted the Inverness bus.  It had a bit of a circuit to do before it came back to the bus stop which wasn’t outside the bar, but a short walk away. 

“We’ll walk you the bus stop,” said the first man that spoke to me.  At some point I had acquired a cat and a seven year old boy.  Someone picked up the cat.  Another man picked up the boy and we all started the journey to the bus stop.

I woke up at this point.  I felt a little bereft.  I wanted my journey to the bus stop.  I wanted to stay in the company of my new found friends.

Before I had even begun to puzzle out some kind of interpretation, those words that instantly came to mind were “It’s all about the journey”.

The word “journey” seems to be tainted with the reality show experience and contestants talking about what they learned along the way or what they will take with them as they get voted out.  This was not like that. 

The friendliness and familiarity of the people on the bus reminded me of my home church.  We are a very small church, but much like a family.  I don’t have my own teenage daughters so I count it a privilege when a young girl tells me about her growing pains.  I sit beside another young girl dissecting poems and counting syllables.

Throughout life there are people who share a part of our journey.  Some walk beside us, or sit on the bus with us, for longer than others.  For some, I think we can make that journey quite unpleasant or a bit of struggle.  Other times, we make the journey a welcoming and comfortable one.  We include rather than exclude people. 

Too often I am the person disappearing behind the newspaper, isolating myself.  By doing so I miss those opportunities to journey beside someone for a while.  The words I could have said to encourage them were never spoken.  We continue to travel in our lonely orbits and that was never God’s intention.  

I time to fold the newspaper and put it away.  It’s time to start telling people about the band at the Tore Arms bar, warn them about the spicy chicken drumsticks and ask them to help us with our homework.