The Quarter Life: Community and Friendship

As always I have decided to invite myself along on a journey that I was not invited on, but I felt I needed to connect this endless rambling to something bigger, especially after having read both Aaron and Bryce's posts, I felt a strong push to hop on the boat (yes, all my comparisons for the rest of my life will most likely be maritime...). I have to struggle to get the money I need to join this little expedition of thought, but I find it worth my moneymore than many other things.

So, if you would like to read the genuine series that this post has been bootlegged into, and why I have chosen to do so, Aaron's post is found at its usual address of http://throughtincansandstring.blogspot.com/ and Bryce's can be found there.

So, friendship. As many of my friends know I have had, in the past, an awkward and rather negatie view of friendship. Yet, now a days, I have found in friendship the heart of life. If God is and always will be the soul, I think friendship is the heart, and community is the mind.

Friendship MUST include both entertainment, enjoyment, tomfoolery, ridiculousness, and many many many laughs and smiles. That is purely a requirement. Friendship must also contain love. Duh and all. But real love, and therefore real friendship, I think, do not always show themselves in the way we would automatically want it to. I think real friendship is hard sometimes because while our friends support us, they also challenge us. I think friendship, consciously and unconsiously, makes everyone involved better and change is never easy.
I have not thought about weddings, because I've never been to one.
My friend Tayrod sent me an email this summer asking me to be IN his wedding, not just go TO it, and I suddenly understood the big deal. I felt a pure and honest desire to be there, and a truly crushed feeling at my inability to do so because of my commitment.
I though, would have to qualify my friends, if I had to, (maybe because calling si my main form of off island communication and one of the thigns i have to go out of my way to do in the current world I inhabit) as follows:

1. Those I would call if I needed to be reminded of God and love.
2. Those I would call if I needed to feel at home.
3. Those I would call if I needed advice.
4. Those I would call if I needed a laugh.
5. Those I would think of calling.
6. Those I would never call.

Sixth place sounds bad... but it is not. Really. It is just personal negligence and forced ranking.
The other thing I think about these days is, if someone asked me, personally , to be with them, in one week, for whatever reason they felt was truly important... who would i give up my 2 year commitment for, with just one question, even with no explination.

I have to say those people exist. I intensly grateful for that Gift.

I belive friendship does not need proximity as much as it needs desire. Distance makes it harder to maintain, but distance, is, for the most part. Temporary. Not always, but many times.

Now,intentional community, christian communtiy, human community... Ha! Wow... well... there's two ways I think about it right now... immediate and worldwide. I think communtiy is effing ridiculously almost close to impossible. That is why it is so rewarding, in a lot of ways, to strive for it. I think genuinely being part of an intentional community and a worldwide community keeps us and our faith alive, gives us a form of joined solitude that, hopefully, pushes us hard towards God, and in the end, requires that we let go of so much of ourselves, and our desires and our wants, and our needs, and all the other OUR stuff.

It requires that we put God first, above all things, and in doing so, in letting go of ourselves and placing God first (which is one of lifes biggest and hardest challenges) we suddenly come to really see, every moment SEE, teh perpetual connectedness of mankind through God and love... wow that sounds hippie ish and new agey, but ti is not. I think it is a strong part of what Jesus was talking about. The connectedness of all people through the divine, forming ONE community, despite language barriers, cultural differences, and all the other complicated stuff... One human communtiy that is there constantly, eternally striving for the same thing... the thing we lost in the fall... whatever that fall was, the thing the legend of Adam and eve holds that IS true... even if they are not fact... thta somewhere along the line our relationships with each other and with God was broken...wewere broken, but we are all striving to put it back together. So community is that that forces us to help each other. We are already part of it, we have to make it intentional because we are blind to it so much of our lives.

For the last 2 weeks I have wanted nothing but to leave th community I am in. Yet, now I realize I can never leave it... it goes with me wherever I go. That is a comforting thought, even though I may be frustrated right now out of my own selfish and self guided ways.

To end:
One thing I have learned from community in the last few months:
PB&J sandwiches ARE good!
One thing I have learned from freindship:
God is alive.