Lately I have been realizing that sharing life together isn’t always easy. When we talk about living life in community and sharing life with each other, I always think about the times when we hang out with one another and we laugh and play and share our life experiences. These times are great, and for many people, where their life lived out in community ends.
I am beginning to see that communal life goes deeper and much beyond laughter in a coffee shop and that living life together is something that we have to consciously make an effort to do because we tend to pull away from it. Thinking of community as a sort of happy-go-lucky hang out time gets us only part of the way there because life isn’t that simple all the time. Life is filled with conflict, pain, indecisiveness, love, lust, greed, and sin, and if we aren’t living in community our conflicts and pains will leave us alone and in the dark, and our sins will fly by unnoticed and unchallenged. When we truly live life together, we allow people to see into our lives and discover who we are. This can be very scary because when we allow our life to be opened for other to see, we run the risk of being judged, looked down upon, hated, despised, and misunderstood. But when you do take the risk to live in close community with others you will always have someone who will plead to Christ on your behalf, someone who loves you enough to challenge you, someone who will tell you when you are full of sh&* and Someone who will love you no matter what you do or don’t do.
Sure, there will always be those people who judge us when we begin to give them a peek into our life, but I think that we all know who the people are in our lives that we can begin to share life with in a powerful and life altering way. All we have to do is take a risk.
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Ya I agree it isn’t easy to share life. Today at group sharing was hard for me. It’s not hard to hide from your problems. Community forces us to deal with them.I always feel like there is something standing in my way when I am asked to share. A feeling saying you have to be something I am not. You are so right it’s scarry to share. I think it’s not that I don’t want to share life with others it’s that I don’t want see my own problems. I want to act as if everything if fine because I am afraid of discovering and then facing the truth. That is not right.I am not where I should be Ryan. I need to change. I need to truely surrender to God. I need to face my fears. I feel convicted. Will you hold accountable to change and face my fears?
Posted by Cole
Accountability. Now there is a christian buzz word if I ever heard one. I’ve been in groups where we all keep each other “accountable”, and where we each had “accountability partners”, and it always seemed like nothing ever changed. I think that it was like that because people can BS you pretty easily. I think that the new paradigm shift is moving from accountability to living in community; and that life lived out in community is much deeper and more meaningful than accountability because when you share life constantly with people, you can’t BS them. No matter what you or I said about our current situation, about how good we are doing and so on, we would be able to read through it easily because our lives would tell each of us something different.
All that being said, I would love to keep you accountable in the way I know we mean when you or I use that word. Cole, you are a good man, and I thank you for sharing life with me and shaping me. You not being where you should be is a common thing you share with everyone, because we can always grow and change from who we are. The growing and changing part comes as our hearts are willing and as our lives are submitted to those around us that we give the ability to speak into it and keep us “accountable”. As we’re discovering, it is definitely not easy to be accountable to others in the way of sharing life with them, but I can guarantee you that it will be good, amazing, beautiful, and the way Christ intended it to be.
Posted by Ryan
I appreciate the conversation that cole’s comment has initiated, but I wanted to comment on the post itself:
Living in community is pretty tough for me, because I (like most people, I would assume) only want people to see the good side of me. I know how lame I am; moreso, I know how full of “conflict, pain, indecisiveness, love, lust, greed, and sin” I am and if people saw that whole side of me they wouldn’t want to be around me any longer. The weird thing is, it’s fairly easy for me to admit my “bad” side to God, and remain confident that He loves me in spite of that. But if I had it my way, I would keep my crap between God and myself, and not let anyone else see it. But you are right, Ryan: when you live in community at some point or another you can’t hide your shit from people any longer. And I guess we have to take that risk of people judging us and rejecting us and leaving us if we ever want to grow and get beyond issues and closer to the person God intended us to be. It’s still hard.
Posted by Sarah
Posted by Cole
Sarah community is hard but God wired us to need it. It’s your choice though are you truely going to surrender or not. I dare you to step out on faith and lay everything on the table and see what God does. What is going to be?
Posted by Cole
“Love is at the same time the foundation of dialouge and dialogue itself”(Paulo Freire) I find myself at times trying to hard to get the best out of people, I always want everyone happy and full of joy. This is not always the case so I get cought in trying to make everyone happy and I fricken end up being the buzz kill and jacking my mind up. All I can do is fricken love on people and hope that the love I can express is a reflection of Him.
Posted by Mark