TRANSFORMED | Transformational Community | Gen. 3:6-19, Matt. 12:46-50 | Week 4

Some of you may know that my wife Heidi and I used to live overseas for most of a decade.  The question we're asked the most is "What do you miss about living overseas?"  It's really easy to answer that because we miss the community.  Whenever you leave someplace you tend to idealize it, so I realize that could be part of it.  But we were, as a foreign community, several hundred in a city of several million, so you immediately had this island mentality----we kind of have to take care of one another.  We had a shared purpose.  We were involved with different works, but almost all of us were there to encourage the local population in the name of Jesus; to help them in practical ways and do other works.  There was a sense of being known and needed.  As one of the docs in the community, I would often get phone calls....What do I do with these symptoms?  Where should I go? Do I need to leave?   Probably what I like the most more is that the communities were overlapping.  If I go to work, I don't see the same people there that I see here on Sunday, and I certainly don't see them in my neighborhood; they're all very disjointed.  But there, I'd see a lot of the same people, whether I was at the clinic, or at International School, or at fellowship.  It was a sense of being known and being a part of things.  

As I thought about that I realized that it wasn't like that at the beginning.  I went overseas when I was in my early 40's, so I had roles that I played, I had some titles [here].  Then all of a sudden I found myself living in a community where I couldn't speak to most people around me, at the beginning, but even those people I could speak with didn't know who I was.  It was very unsettling.  How about you?  Have you had a similar experience?  Maybe you've recently relocated, or maybe your life circumstances have changed in such a way that you suddenly feel like you're not known.  That raises the question--Why do we get so much joy when we know we're in good community?  Is community optional?  We've all got apps---NextDoor, South app; I have this great Peak Finder app to use while hiking.  Is community like an app that you can add on and it makes life better?  Or, is there something so important and fundamental to who we are that if we're not in community, we miss out and the community we should be a part of misses out?...