Many modern Americans have a wide but thin network of relational circles that rarely overlap one another. These circles often fluctuate with competing priorities from acquaintances and friendships where significant connections with each other are hit or miss at best.
Sometimes we reach a point where we want less of and more from our relationships. We want those we have significant connections with to also have significant connections with one another. We want to be a part of something bigger than the sum of its parts. We want a network of genuine, reliable, interdependent community.
Real relational depth can only grow if we start putting down roots together.
What we long for in community — connection, a sense of belonging, shared meaning — is found in committed relationship to one another. That commitment is what makes a family, regardless of blood ties.
Community does not exist outside this foundational commitment. However counterintuitive, we cannot “try on” community like a pair of pants to find the right fit. Individual friendships may need such discretion, but the network of relationships found in authentic community is more like family. Most of don’t get to choose everyone who we are in community with — just as no one chooses the family we are born into. The choice we do have is whether or not to be open, present, available, and engaged in choosing to love the person right in front of us.
So how do you get into community? How does one become a real part of it?
You marry into community.
Community is developed the same way families are made — you simply build a relationship with someone and commit to be with them. That’s it. Yes. It’s really that simple. Of course, it isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. Be sure to count the costs and only make such a decision after deligent consideration.
“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
Thinking of community as a family commitment is one way for us to push beyond the illusions of what we imagine community should be to experience it as it really is. Once genuine commitment puts a stake in the ground, bridges can be built across huge chasms of relational distance.
Hence, family is one of our six core values.
Idea explorer. Visual storyteller. Conflict mediator.