People are more connected than ever before through social media, but we’re also more isolated from one another. Over the last fifteen years, attendance at club meetings has dropped 58 percent; family dinners have dropped 43 percent and having friends over has dropped by 35 percent. We crave community even as we seek to avoid it. Why?
Perhaps it’s because of our expectations of relationships and our vision of community is on our own terms rather than God’s? Maybe we like the idea of community, but not actual community. Most of us desire intimacy and genuine friendships, but we can struggle in experiencing it.
Mark Labberton said, “We may long to know others and to be known, but the culture teaches us to practice superficiality rather than honesty, to share competencies, not weaknesses, and to hide skillfully rather than seek genuine trust. We are less and less in community.”
One of the ironies of an increasingly urbanized techno world and a global population is that people commonly experience life alone. Community should be a natural cornerstone of life as a Christ-follower, we’re meant to be a part of the community of God’s people. Some have a hard time belonging to a community.
I’ve known several Asian American Christians who had deep identity conflicts within their families in their process of fitting into American culture. Their homeland was so radically different from the U.S. We’re they to keep their Asian culture’s deference to their elders or become the highly individualized American that their parents warned them about?
Many said they were sojourners. Many of them came to believe that whatever city (Los Angeles) they were in was the place where God had sent them and that the story of that city was their story as well.
Like my Asian friends in L.A. many are stuck in their silos rather experiencing the risk and joy of being in a community who is truly not like them in ethnicity, background, personality or in other ways. How can we help those kinds of people or maybe you’re stuck too? It could help us to distinguish between the “first things” and the “next things.”
First things
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Matthew 22:36-39
If you’re a Christ-follower God’s call to us is that we love God first and our neighbors second and that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we come to bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives:
“…but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faith- Illness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).
The first things (our common calling as Christ followers) have more of an emphasis on loving than just doing. Being in a love relationship with God can enable us to become the kind of person that the Galatians passage describes. It can open doors for others to see Christ regardless of what we are doing and with whom.
Next things
After the first primary things God has specific things in mind (callings) for us in the context of work and relationships where our gifts, talents, education, opportunity and passion can draw us to our jobs or volunteering. Next things are not first things although both matter.
The call of the first things is primary, yet we are tempted to make the next thing the first thing. We go about life and forget or neglect who we are, that we are loved and we are to love others.
We are meant to develop first things as we go about the next thing knowing that they are not the same. God is far more concerned about the first things than the next things (daily tasks…) – how we love Him and our neighbor. As we do this our love for God will be seen in how we love others in the everyday stuff of life.
