Community

Maybe it is the shadow-side of being bookish and introverted, but as a child I often wanted to shut myself up in my room rather than walk out into the world. If there was an option between a party and staying in bed, I mostly chose my bed. I’m a homebody, and I love to be cozy, so often this tendency is good. It makes me the kind of person that people want to open up and talk to, because I’m good at making a cup of coffee and sitting down and making space — I am generally good at lingering. But I also take it too far, and I will sometimes purposefully shut out the world in order to maintain control over my emotions and atmosphere. I remember in college, when my roommates asked me why I would go in my room and shut the door instead of doing my homework out in the living room, where they all studied. I didn’t even know this about myself until they brought it up, and I felt offended by the allegations. Don’t all people want to be alone most of the time? Anyways, I was just introverted — that’s who I was, I told them. But the seed was planted, and over the next decade I began to see my isolationism more and more clearly. I had put up extensive walls in my life, and I found it hard to knock them down, even when I named them for what they were. I couldn’t get to them on my own, because being on my own is what had created them in the first place. I needed something outside of myself, and the remedy to a life of isolation and walls is, of course, people. 

Theoretically, I love people. I love to call out good things in people and care about them from a distance. Vulnerability, though, is another matter. To be close to people scared me to the point of near anxiety attacks. Over time, though, I began to attach myself to people I could trust — first to a friend in high school, then to another in college. I began to open up and tell the truth about things, and I slowly committed myself to a few more friends over the early years of my twenties. I wouldn’t call myself a good friend, since my desire to be alone often creates tension in my relationships, but people began to sneak through my defenses and stick around, even when I forgot to call back. And then came what is probably the most important decision of my life so far, barring the vows I will make to my fiancé in a few months time: I committed to my church. 

It has been a decade, now, that I have loved and served and been wounded by my church. I used to say that my highest highs and lowest lows have come from that community, but that’s no longer true — my lowest lows have come from my own mistakes and chains. Still, the church has hurt me, as any church will. What matters more, though, is how it has healed me. This community has, over the past 10 years, been the remedy to my isolation and anxious attachment. Community has been God’s prescription, his salve, for my younger, incessant wounds. I have sat with middle school girls every Tuesday night, sipping hot chocolate and laughing as my inner-thirteen-year-old grew up alongside them. I have cooked with new friends, bonding over good food and shared anxiety, going over to their house in my sweatpants on Saturday mornings to eat breakfast bagels and play with their kids. I have been heartbroken by the politics of church; I have hyperventilated in my pastor’s office out of anger and grief and had to work through those feelings without running away. I have sat with women in Quran/Bible studies, been gifted lentil soup from those women when I was sick, become forever friends with a little girl who walked into a food giveaway and said “I love it here, I want to be here every day.” For four years, I have sat with the same people over dinner every other Friday night, sharing joys and fears, inviting new people in and bidding others see-you-later. I don’t know how to explain the good that has come from all of this, even when it was bad.

The church has a dramatic amount of issues, my church included. I don’t deny it or sweep it under the rug, and at it’s worst, community can become warped and haunted. What I have found, though, has been the redemption of community — the raw, gritty, blood and bones nature of being with people day in and day out. The church is Christ’s hospital, and we’re all broken people helping to mend other broken people. In fact, it is probably our obsession with mending others that gets us in trouble. At the end of the day, we are all meant to be together, but not so that we can heal each other — only so that, by being together, God can heal each of us through his Spirit, drawing out our issues and complexities and brokenness only when we are vulnerable enough for them to be seen amongst others. We open ourselves up for healing when we step outside the cells of our isolation. At its best, community is the space where the remedy becomes known; it is the place where the Spirit of God is administered to our broken, weary hearts. This remedy hurts, sometimes, and it isn’t the easy way out — but it has been, and will continue to be, the bedrock of my healing.