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By Marrick Reeve
While serving as a missionary with NET Ireland, my 4 teammates and I lived in a quaint townhouse behind the church, close to the quay. Life was generally wet and rainy, and I loved it. It can be easy to look back on that time of my life and romanticize it – living in harmony, sharing the mundane duties of cooking, cleaning, and other household chores; welcoming and hosting guests almost every other day; praying as a community; taking leisurely strolls to buy groceries; making day trips to the picturesque places along the coast, and so much more.
And yet, it was one of the hardest years of my life. Community life is truly not for the faint of heart, with clashing personalities, looming conflict, and the micro (and sometimes macro) annoyances that come with living with other (imperfect) people. Differences in the way in which you do laundry, tastes in music and food, cleanliness levels, communication styles, and cultural influences.
I distinctly remember it being my turn to cook supper. While I was prepping, I noticed we had run out of tin foil, and someone had put the empty roll back on the shelf. While mildly annoying and eyeroll-inducing, it wasn’t a huge deal because there was a full box underneath it. Until there wasn’t. There wasn’t just one empty box, but TWO empty tin foil boxes back on the shelf. And in the middle of meal prep, I had no tin foil. The anger and frustration bubbled and boiled over. A teammate came into the kitchen, saw my need, and took it upon themselves to go and get more without my asking. The epitome of community? Taking another’s need upon yourself when you have the capacity to do so; a give and take; a time to serve and a time to be served.
We can find community in so many different aspects of life: at church, at school, on teams, and at home in our own families. In this season of early motherhood, I have found community in my “village” (which is truly the current societal way of talking about true community), the people who have been around to help, to hold, to cry with, and to laugh with.
The thing about having a village is that it also requires me to be a villager (a community member who contributes to the community). It requires effort and intentionality. It is a call to serve in the ways in which I can in this season of life, looking beyond myself and beyond my needs and desires to Christ within others through: random Thursday evening dinner invitations to a meal thrown together with what we have, dishes still on the counter, laundry sitting out waiting to be folded, and toys on the floor; dropping off a care package to another newly postpartum mom of things she actually needs; sending a “how’s today going?” or the “I’m going to the store – what can I pick up for you?” texts to a friend going through a tough time.
It can be comfortable to see community (and villages) in a curated, picturesque “life is easy when we all work together” type of way, but community is so much deeper than that. It requires cultivated, deep-dug work of trust, mutual care, and self-sacrifice.
St. Francis saw the need for community, and he made it a priority in his life. He promoted and lived his life focused on interconnectedness with God, with others, and with Creation. He saw the opportunities to serve, but also allowed himself to be served. He radically based his rule of life on equality and mutual service, and that rule of life is still lived out today. Community life was (and is) essential to the spiritual journey.
May we learn from St. Francis in this jubilee year the importance of community in our own lives. That the call to serve and to be served is necessary on our spiritual journeys towards heaven, and ultimately, sanctifies us the most. May we, like St. Francis, pour out of ourselves in the name of Jesus without counting the cost, and may we roll our eyes less at the lack of metaphorical tin foil.
Marrick is a former youth ministry coordinator and NET alumna. She currently spends most of her time at home caring for her son, hanging out at local coffee shops, grabbing lunch with a friend, perusing the weekly grocery flyers, and dreaming of traveling.
