community

God, you are redemptive. You know my heart. You know that I resist community so often. And you know that I have been begging you for a sense of belonging, for a people that will build me up and encourage me and challenge me and PRAY for me and you have done it and you are doing it. And I look and I see that you are a healer. You are healing my fear and distrust and separation from the body of christ. All through this community group that meets on wednesday nights for a few hours. And I think back to an afternoon not too long and so long ago sitting on the grass with a dear friend and a very broken heart about needing, craving, community. Friends in the lord. Needing what the church of acts had with each other. Needing to be loved by other college students. To have a place where I am real with people. All the way. Truthful and vulnerable and the whole thing. And I think of tonight. And the way my group loved me well. So remarkably well. They pray for me and they appreciate me and we worship together and share together and again it is redemptive because you are lovingly breaking the walls that have been in place for such a long, long time that said not to let anyone and not to be real and to hide and to stay safe and in those tall, terrible walls I was all alone. And its crazy to see how evident my sin is during group just as it is evident to see filth in the light. The desire to isolate, the judgements on others, the resistance to community, the inability to pay attention during prayer, the fear of attack-those things are not from you. They are lies, all lies, and you are a God of Truth. Everything about you is fully true. There is no falseness in you, but these thoughts and fears and dangers aren't real. What is real is that I can be open and true with my group, I can be absolutely who I am and they will love me because they are yours and you love me. In all my messiness and brokenness you love me. And I trust that, but I am just now learning to trust the body. Because I say to you, God-this body-its people. and people are not like you and so I can not trust them and I cannot know them like I know you. And you say, Love, these people I have transformed into the body of Christ and you are a part of that body and I am making you, making the body, more like me. You must trust them. You must love them. Just as I love you. I have given my whole self to you when you have proven and shown that you will reject it and by doing that I am sanctifying you, I am making you what you cannot otherwise become. Christ is being formed in you. And you get to do the same with people. Trust them and love them and do life with them because I am making you like me and that is how I treat human beings.