What It Means To Be Part Of A Community

Hey everybody!  I have been thinking a lot about community, and what it means to be a part of a community.  Now, I am definitely talking about my house, and I am definitely talking about my neighborhood.  We have already had a video on that.  But I am also thinking about the larger community, and then I am thinking about what the news wants me to think about.  When I watch certain news channels, they are always harping on different themes.  But consistently two or three or four themes.  What they are doing is trying to draw my attention away from my locality and be fixed on another situation.

I have gone through this before.  I live in Kentucky, and I have a lot of friends and clients in Houston, Texas.  I remember when the hurricane came through in 2017, and it rained, and rained, and rained.  I literally sat in front of the TV, and I was praying for my friends and clients, and I was thinking about them, and I was mesmerized by the news coverage, and I was depressed by what I was hearing, and I was wondering what people were doing.  I think it was good in a way; I texted people and I sent emails and let them know that I was thinking about them and praying for them. But in the end it was way too much time and way too much focus on something that was so removed from me and that I had little control over that it just defeated me and depressed me.

So I want to encourage you to be aware of how other people are trying to draw your attention away from your locality and spread it to places that are far away. Now this doesn’t mean that we are to be ignorant of what is going on in other countries around the world.  We want to know.  It is not to mean that we don’t have compassion for other people around the world.  We certainly do.  We want to have compassion and empathy, and act in their best interests.  What can we do to help now?  

But we don’t want to focus so much on things that we have little impact or little control over when there are people right around us that we are overlooking because our viewpoint is too expansive.  And right now, people in our home, people in our neighborhood, people in our subdivision, people in our town, they need us.  They need us.  We need to follow those protocols, but we need to get out.  We need to talk to people.  We need to connect with people.  We need to just be able to have that semblance of community, and I don’t mean that in a negative way.  I think we need to go from semblance of community to real community by taking some time to be together and focusing on one another.

So let me encourage you to be aware of what is happening globally but be focused on what is around you locally.  I hope that will be a good use for your time and your energy, and that you will build some good relationships that way.