Community? (Part 4)

by Liann

While we were in Minneapolis I started reading a book from a guy name Dave Andrews called Not Religion, But Love.  I didn’t get to finish it but I am planning to track it down soon in order to do so.  In the mean time I’ve been trying to find articles of his to read up on, so far this one: reweaving has been my favorite.  I know it’s a few pages, but I would encourage each of you to read it as I feel it shares some really important information.  Aside from geeking out about some of the works Andrews’ sites in his article (some of my favorite books from college) what seems so significant to me about this article is that it explains many of the qualities seen in connected communities–community networks are shown to positively affect our safety, health, generosity, honesty, equality and even our happiness.  When people have strong community networks they are less like to cheat on taxes and insurance claims and more likely to stop people who are inflicting violence in their neighborhood…. so if community is so good for us, why do we keep moving further and further away from it?

I think it’s because Satan is working to isolate us.  If we look at the trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are connected, they are one.  They are an intricate web of togetherness and I think we are made to reflect that; we are made to be in relationship.  So the dark forces of this world work against that, they make us feel isolated, alone, and disconnected.  We have no desire to reach out because we are taught to be scared of our neighbors and are convinced that even if our neighbors aren’t evil or weird they probably won’t like us anyway.  So we don’t.  We stay inside and, if we do dare to make friends, we keep relationships superficial.

Andrews’ article mentioned that community networks effect generosity–often people who have received help are more willing to give it.  This reminds me of a story my friend Cheri told me.  She was at a Chipotle once, talking to the guy in line behind her.  While I’m not sure how it came up she mentioned to him that whenever she goes to the grocery store she wishes she could pick a person in line and pay for their entire basket of groceries, noting how excited she would be about getting to do that.  He laughed a bit and said he didn’t get it.  Their conversation moved on as did the line, they got their food and went their separate ways.  As she was eating in the restaurant, Cheri felt like God told her to buy him a gift certificate to Chipotle, so she did.  She told me that when she handed it to him his face turned red, he broke out into the biggest smile and gave her a huge hug.  While she couldn’t be sure of it, Cheri doubted that he had ever gotten to receive random generosity, or possibly even generosity when he needed it.

I think this is how the Holy Spirit moves.  God wants to interrupt the patterns of our lives and culture because our culture is not His.  When we are disengaged we cannot experience the relationships that will show us the character of God, which is great for Satan but bad for our souls.  I want to encourage each of us to look for the ways that God is calling us love our neighbors as well as gain a better understanding of how we are disconnected.  I think articles like this one help us gain broader insight to the problems we are facing and when we know more about what’s going wrong we can be more conscious of  how to change it.  Ask God to show you how to overcome our cultures lack of community.

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