Community

Community is a word with almost no meaning anymore. In an age of individualism, where we are out to pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, there is no room for having a community. Indeed, when deciding on major issues such as our where we live and work, community is usually at the bottom of the list and if it is thought of at all, it is in relationship to a crime rate. Community has gone the way of the extended family in our country and we now live in neighborhoods, not communities. Anyone can be neighbors simple by proximity, but that does not make it a community. What is community and what should it look like? It is a sharing of personal property and time for a common good. It is taking serious interest in each other lives beyond curious prying. It is fellowshipping, sacrificing, sharing and living life to the fullest. It is all this and so much more. I am so thankful that I have had the grandest of opportunities to grow up in a real community, flawed and in the rough as it is. But I still wonder, what more there must be out there that we are missing out on in this gift of God to mankind we call a community.