I WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

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I never leave people or circumstances quietly. I dearly wish I could. As much as I despise being the center of attention, my deep convictions are constantly calling me to initiate hard conversations, wade into conflict, and articulate complex, often painful truths. Its not a role I covet, but I have learned to accept its value.

I wrote an open letter to my church that I knew would be largely received as a breakup. It wasn't. It was my refusal to leave quietly with a host of unresolved issues trailing behind me. It was an invitation to endure in community together inconveniently and unconventionally.

I am really enjoying John Mark Comer's Practicing the Way series on Community. I like that he is not relegating it to the periphery of the Christian life, as if it doesn't require just as much intentionality and effort as prayer and fasting. Once you experience rich moments of being alone with GOD, it becomes something you crave. It almost never takes anything from you but time and that time becomes a willing sacrifice because you know what you will gain from it. Community is a much trickier beast, in my opinion. It WILL drain you, particularly if your an introvert like me. You might not see the benefits of it right away and it will ask you to constantly resist the constructs of modern western life that we inherited from generations before us. You wont always enjoy it. You wont always want to participate. You wont want to deal with people's confusing mannerisms, mixed signals, and grating idiosyncracies. You wont want people to see up close the ways in which you still need to grow in your Christian life. But I think placing all the weight of perfecting Christian character on your spouse and/or your children is grossly unfair. Jesus, the disciples, and much of the early church did much of this outside of their nuclear families. In fact, I recently learned that the idea of the nuclear family is a modern construct that is less than 100 years old. Politics, culture, and marketing triumph from our loneliness and disconnectedness---so does the enemy of every human soul.

I suppose the proof will have to be in my pudding---the banana kind with the those chessmen vanilla wafers, full fat whip cream, and freshly sliced bananas. Yum! But it will be a cold day in hell before I abandon this community of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers simply because they don't understand my intentions. I'm not raging against death, but against the narrow-minded viewpoint that community must be on singular, absolute terms. Love and relationships are complicated. Lets accept that truth together rather than migrating from church to church every few years to maintain a life of surface relationships, a feel-good Sunday morning experience, and a lack of accountability for the ways in which the cream-filled center of our lives bear very little resemblance to Christ. Lets stop being fine with these outcomes because its just the water we swim in. We are supposed to have streams of living water flowing from the inside of us! At least, that's what MY Bible says.

-Stay Thoughtful