Community

The communities that I’m a part of all deal with relationships with people. The communities that come to mind are my family, brothers and sisters in Christ, my friends at home, and my friends here at Belmont.

The only community that I’m a part of that has rules is the one where there is an authority over myself; the community of my family. In that community I’m expected by my mom and dad to honor what my they tell me to do or what not to do. The principle behind that rule is that they are my parents and they have authority over me, thus I must act in compliance with what they say.

In all the other communities that I’m a part of there are strictly expectations. Whether it is my friends at home in Kentucky or my friends here at Belmont, it’s the same expectations. This is because they are both based on relationships and in relationships there are expectations that you will respect your friends and you will honor their perspective as much as your own. Naturally we all fall short to that one because we are all selfish in nature and look out for ourselves first and then our close friends second. I think we know these expectations because we’ve grown up and learned what a relationship is about and how they work and if you don’t honor these basic expectations then the relationship will no longer exist.

The community amongst friends is a unique breed. It’s a community that almost every person is a part of. But what is its purpose? I think the easy answer is to just have fun, but why do we have this desire to have fun with peers and what makes these communities work? I think of my friends at home, we all started hanging out my sophomore year in high school and what brought us together was that we all shared a similar view/focus on life at the time. Our focus was to have fun without getting in trouble, and honor God, and girls. So I guess our common “goal” is what united us together and the expectations grew from there to maintain those friendships and bolster our “goal” as friends. (I put goal in quotations marks because what friends sit down and discuss what they are about? And I think goals are usually something that are announce so that everyone knows what they are working towards, which isn’t the case in my friend group)

The difference between my family’s community and my friends community is that there are rules in my family as well as expectations and growing up with three sisters is where I learned how to interact with people in a relationship. It’s good to have a firm foundations for your other communities from which the of lesser communities spawn from. In regards to the particular rule amongst my family that I mentioned earlier I think rules are easier to break because you more than likely know the consequence rather than when you don’t meet and expectations they can create a riff in a relationship and (or) hurt people. Another thing that contributes to this that I touched on earlier is that we are all selfish in nature and these expectations and rules hold us accountable and remind us to not just focus on our own desires but also the needs and desires of our peers whom we want to keep as friends because it’s always so much fun to be together.

How did I become a part of this community? I became a part of my community of friends because I went to school with these guys and as we hung out we slowing realized that we liked being around each other and began to share the same “goal” as we grew deeper in our friendship. When communities are formed there is an unspoken exclusivity that is naturally formed unintentionally. So when other people came along it wasn’t that they were too weird to “be a part” but it was just that we didn’t jive with each other and they didn’t feel the need or want be a part. Most of communities are exclusive in some way shape or form and most of the time it is unintentional.

The community of brothers and sisters in Christ I think is the most natural and raw community that exists. We are all united by our joy in the Heavenly Father and His victory in the end. Because of this, anyone who shares these beliefs is automatically “in” in the community. That’s is what is so great about God’s community of believers, there couldn’t be anymore nonexclusive because God wants everyone. As you delineate down from this broad group there are smaller communities all they way down to two or so people, that are exclusive in nature like my community of friends at home.

Communities are one of the many joys that we get to be a part of in this world. To maintain them we have created expectations and sometimes there is necessity for rules too. We are all united in a grand community are earthly beings and that is why there is a need to help our fellow communers if they are under-privileged, have a disagreement, or any of them that need help because that’s what communities are about; helping people who have a connection with yourself through a common goal or relationship.