Community

                 Welcome to Day 10! You can read the rest of the 31 days series here.

For the past year I have been longing to move to move to the country. My life here is not quiet and it is certainly not private. My soul craves natural beauty, not the abundance of concrete and blowing trash that greet me here. It's been almost 6 years of fighting to keep a lovely, welcoming little spot in a busy, dirty, crowed location. Horns honk, sirens scream, the children cannot go outside alone, and odd people come to my door. Sometimes I am just weary of it all.

But this has also been the year that our family has been the most useful to this community. The elderly around us have especially needed us. We have waited for ambulances, tended wounds, called people's family members, and helped take out trash. We've received difficult phone calls and attended a funeral for a young person. We gone to meetings about free rain barrels and met other soap makers and urban gardeners. We've asked simple questions and witnessed tears over a faith that is drifting. We've talked with people about chickens, helped fix cars, and listened with empathy to accounts of under employment. We've celebrated holidays together, helped provide jobs, loaned tools, and found we weren't the only family dealing with food allergies. Phone numbers have been exchanged. Connections have been made....both the "haves" who live behind us and the "have nots" who live around us. So many colors, nationalities, economic statuses, and faiths crammed together in our little corner of the world. And we are literally in the center of it all.

Community takes courage. It takes enough "brave" to put aside your personal preference for peace ( not to mention alone time!) and focus on being useful to the Lord. It takes a confidence in God's plans to embrace the spot where He has placed you....trash, sirens, and all.  It takes risk to be a part of the world around you, one where everyone is so different, because somewhere along the way  folks are going to think you are weird!  And it takes prayerful, brave conviction to gracefully live out your differences when there is every chance that you might be misunderstood.

This rural-loving introvert needs quite a bit more work, but she's seeing the beauty of community and she's certainly braver than she used to be!