Finding Meaning for the New Year

Lately my pastor Nancy Ortberg made a provocative statement that I've quoted at least three times nows. "In these days a person needs two conversions: the first to community; the second to Jesus." (Not exact, since I didn't write it down at the time.)

Nancy was not talking about a, "Let's meet at the coffee shop every Saturday morning and moan about the loan news and gripe about politics" kind of community. Nor just about the "Mothers Club" of my home city where moms can meet other mothers of young children and find play dates and chat about tips for handling diapers, vomiting and biting toddlers.

Those things are important relief for our loneliness and confusion, but we need more. We need community that will help bring change at our core. Community where together we shine a little light into this dark world.

Yesterday I spent time with a dear friend, a teacher whom I got to know when we both lived in Kobe, Japan. She's still teaching English, but now in SF and we find time to reunite once or twice a year.

On awakening this morning I thought of a story she told: of a fifty year old American with Japanese wife who died recently in child birth. She left him withe great gift of two baby girls, but he now he must cope with the combined grief and joy of single parenting. He must race between the four English teaching jobs he taken to survive in Tokyo while living the huge cultural conflicts inherent in being with his mother-in-law who kindly cares for the babes, I'm sure as she grieves both the death of her husband and only daughter in the past year she is not an easy person to be with. And every time the father looks into the faces of his baby girls, does he regret their decision to seek fertility treatment? See death in the face of the living?

Joy at birth, sadness at death and loss - it permeates our world. The quest for meaning and connection that drives the energetic young can turn into a life of just trying to survive economically or find distraction from depression as people age.

I wish for that Japanese widow and American widower the community I've experienced that's sustained me. Through being involved with genuine Christ-imitators (not the raging, homophobia fake kind you see on TV), I've found comfort, strength, and even sometimes joy in my own crises or stage of life issues (fending off depression and self-hatred as my teenagers do their perfectly normal thing of launching off and kicking me as they do so).

What a difference to have people I regularly see once a week who smile with warmth, who are glad to hear my hurts, share my tears and pray for me, and with whom I can work to change our corner of the world - like together provide a homemade dinner for the homeless, together fill a huge truck twice with canned goods to restock the depleted shelves of Second Harvest Food bank, or together help a depressed woman with a baby and three and five-year-old boys who's separated from her husband and fighting the affects of having been physically abused.

I couldn't do these things alone. Alone, I'd end up just spending time with
friends, shopping or reading books/watching movies. Alone, I'd feel overwhelmed or afraid of the confusion and despair that can come when I get involved with needy or manipulative people. But, by walking hand in hand with others committed to being a force for practical good, I can light a lamp into desperate dark places my corner of the world.

With commitment to regularly spiritual community I find strength to fight off
my own inner demons (of which I still have many) as well as to give to others at a cost but with joy.