Community - a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.

 

This is what we have been for the past four weeks here at CIT, Union Mills, North Carolina. We have been a community. We have laughed and cried, prayed and played, shared our food and our hearts. We have been overwhelmed with information that has challenged who we are, what we believe, the things we do... and been blessed to know that we are not alone.

 

Today that community as we know it comes to an end. It’s the last day of the Equipping module here at CIT. Three of the families and one individual will be leaving us, taking the next step on their journey –  whether back to fundraising or getting on a plane to leave for their host country or something else. Those of us who stay will miss them, but soon it will be time for our own next steps. While the miles may separate us, we will still be a community – a group of people with a common interest – being Jesus’ hands and feet in a hurting world.

 

Monday, we start again to build a community, to discover how this new combination of people with different backgrounds, personalities and gifts will come together. The topic is different – Second Language Acquisition Training, but our interest remains the same – to be Jesus to the world. I’m looking forward to meeting more people who have the heart of Jesus.

 

 

 

It rained this morning. I could hear the raindrops hitting the window and the drum of rain on the roof. If each drop represented one new idea or fact or concept that I have learned since coming to CIT, I’m not sure there would be enough of them – even though it rained steadily.

 

All my life I have been a person who categorizes things and organizes them in a systematic order. When I can’t remember things, I tell my kids that it’s because every year of my life I have added filing cabinets in my brain and filed things into folders in each drawer. If I don’t remember something immediately, I haven’t really forgotten it. I just don’t know which folder I put it in. As I get older, it takes me longer and longer to search through and find it because there are always more folders and more cabinets.

Over the years, I have been aware that some of the information I filed under certain categories probably didn’t really fit there and needed to be re-categorized and re-filed. But it was a slow process – one that I could take as long as I liked to do and if it didn’t get finished, maybe it didn’t really matter. Today, after my 8^th day of classes, I feel like the drawers of the filing cabinets in my brain have been torn open, folders have been pulled out and emptied onto the floor in a mishmash of ideas, thoughts, values, beliefs, feelings, truth, choices, preferences…..where once there was order, there is now chaos.

For some of you, this would not be a bad thing. You love chaos, disorder, change. For me, it is traumatic. How can I think all this through and put it all back in the right drawers? How much of what is written in those folders needs to be crossed out and rewritten? How will I know that I am rewriting it correctly? How will I ever find the time to clean up this mess?

Unable to face reading my assignments and adding more to the overwhelming clutter on the floor of my mind, I took a walk. The sun was shining. There was a refreshing breeze blowing. I went to a cemetery just down the road and respectfully sat on a tombstone. I looked at the blue sky, felt the warm sun, listened to the breeze rustling the branches of the trees and felt the peace of the moment sink into my spirit. As I sat, wondering how I was going to handle all the “stuff” that was in my brain, God spoke to my heart and said, “Let it be. Don’t organize it. Don’t try to figure it out. Just let it be.”

And so I will.