These days I am struck by my readiness to throw myself into community. I spent a summer learning exactly what that means and exactly how important it is to me, and I am beyond excited that this year will (hopefully) involve embracing a similar kind of community. In imagining the apartment and intentional community I'll be living in, I can see so many possibilities for grace, depth, and being Christ to each other. I can't wait to experience the simplicity of living together: cooking and eating together, sharing joys and burdens, walking together in mutual accountability and love.
It's not just this kind of community that I want, though. Today I told someone that I'm turning myself into a porch-sitter. It might sound more or less negligible, but I think there's something profound in simply moving yourself out to your front porch. Not only does it allow you to be closer to nature and creation, it makes you physically visible and also more emotionally present to your neighbors (both literal and figurative). It opens up opportunities to interact with those who pass by around you. And perhaps most of all, it forces you to expand beyond your comfort bubble of your house. I always say the one thing I want to avoid most in life is complacency, and letting myself remain comfortably within my own four walls seems overly complacent.
Maybe it's overanalyzing to claim that the act of sitting on your porch encompasses all these things, but I need a metaphor for the things I'm striving for. So here's to becoming a society of porch-sitters: people who venture beyond what is merely comfortable and strive for openness, acceptance, and risk-taking vulnerability.
beautiful.
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