After spending some time with friends tonight, I have realized again the importance of being in community. This is something that I began to understand during my last couple years of school. It became apparent to me that God puts us in situations where we really need each other. He created us to need each other. He is forming a body of believers out of this world, a body with different parts that are all dependent on the whole.
Thus, if we are not acting like the body that God is making us, we will not be doing our job correctly. That includes being honest with each other. A passage from Michael Yaconelli's book "Messy Spirituality" struck me as so strangely true. It refers to the pretending we do when we are trying to hide what is really going on in our lives, what we really struggle with, and that we are really not "OK." This is what Yaconelli has to say.
"“Pretending is the grease of modern nonrelationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren"’t. People who pretend have pretend relationships. But being real is a synonym for messy spirituality, because when we are real, our messiness is there for everyone to see."
The messiness is hard, but it is necessary, because we were made to rely on each other.
I need to stop messing around with pretending and modern nonrelationships and really be intentional about being a friend to those people that God has put into my life.
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