Lessons from Memorial Days
So the long weekend is over and it left me thinking about friendships and community. Friendships since a recent conversation was about my lasting frienships with a couple of high school buds. Our friendships go back to 20 years. There is something nice about that, like we have endured the silliness and now we can just sit down to serenely catch up on things without a need to compare status quo. Gone are the days when we tried to one-upped each others.
Instead we have gotten to a point where we can just listen about what's going on in our lives — renovating the house, our fallen idealism of our so-called educareer, gardening, pets, hobbies that keep our life interesting AND sane, relationships, home (home is where the heart is), and our ongoing friendships. Call me a sentimentalist but I would love to be stuck on an island with these group of buds, something to bbq, and some interesting conversations.
Now I'll turn to community. Community because for the first time in 30+ years of my life I find myself thinking about belonging to something more permanent than transitioning out of sporadic friendships and memories. I have always been quite resourceful at adapting to new environments and fitting into new group of friends. This comes from just moving from Norcal to Socal and then back to Norcal again. All this moving has made life interesting. However there are sometimes (more so recently) where I have yearn for belonging in something bigger than just adapting or assimilating to situations. Bare in mind that there's nothing wrong in that. It's just how I feel at the moment (now!) of my life.
Where is this all going? It's just looking back at the places I have been (LA and SF), I'm starting to ADAPT (there's that word again) to the suburb proper called Sunnyvale. And I'm starting to develop a sense of community from church. After all church is not just a sanctuary to get respite from the stress of life, it is a community. As Vic said in one of our small group fellowship, it is Life on Life. Perhaps here in Sunnyvale, at GrX I will start to gather and collect frienship memories that will last even longer than 20 years. Call me a sentimentalist and a romantic, but I can't wait for those memories.
