The Broken Places First

   I have been thinking about brokenness lately, those broken places in our lives where we are wounded. Specifically, what happens when we let our woundedness define us. When we have to explain how we have been hurt in order to let people know who we are, are we really letting healing happen? I am not advocating for immediate healing from emotional hurts, but I would like to challenge us to not let our hurts be our primary identity, replacing that we are children of God. 

Magnet

I feel as if I am a magnet for the broken pieces of the world, but in that I have seen God working through me as an agent of healing. What a gift to myself and others. 

The Search for Community

   Community for me is more then an idea or an ideal, it is life. It has taken me quite some time to reach that conclusion, and even more time to adjust my expectations for community. Have you ever noticed that when we enter a situation with high (unattainable, even) expectations that we tend to have a negative view of a situation. Our expectations block us from seeing any of the blessings.

    Community has become such a buzz word. Everyone wants to apply it to where they live and what they are trying to sell because of the belief that in our individualistic age people are searching, hungry for authentic community. But when we make community a label, we take away its authenticity and diminish what true community is. We make it some lofty goal instead of the beauty and chaos and dirt of life. God breathed life into a pile of dirt and made Adam. So we breathe life into the community around us, and those people fill our lungs with breath and life and love.

    It is not the absence of community or individuality that keeps us from giving and receiving life in community - it is our expectations leading to the inability to recognize the community that we have. When we ignore anything that doesn't match the image of community that we hold in our mind, we are doing a dis-service to others as well as spitting on the blessing of God. Open your eyes and be thankful for what you have been given, for it is so much more then you could ever imagine. For you are alive because of community, you thrive because of community, your identity is formed and reformed through the encouragement and rebuke of community, and in community you are not just another person. You are not lost. You are found and you are important. The search is over if only we would stop and realize what we have!

"If just one person believes in you...."