Dear Next Year's Me

Written by Holly Paulette

Dear Next Year’s Me,

Is it true? We made it to 2021? That, in and of itself, feels miraculous. What a doozy this year has been, and it’s barely May. 

Lest you forgot--a pandemic ravaged our world this year. I filled up my ol’ minivan for less than $20, especially thanks to our growing Kroger Rewards because our family eats approximately one million more meals than before. Schools have been out since Spring Break. Restaurants are only offering carry-out, if that (please tell me Nagoya opened back up). I had to crowd-source two pounds of chicken from my group texts to be able to make dinner one night. I homeschooled our wild child, with a toddler and newborn in tow. Birthdays were celebrated by drive-by parades, weddings took place on Zoom, and--most heartbreaking of all--funerals were postponed. And that’s just in my little world. The world around us saw tragic numbers of illness, death, and pain. 

But--it wasn’t all terrible, and because we’re a people prone to forgetting, here’s a list of a few things I want to remember coming out of this season of quarantine:

Appreciate church. In the hustle and bustle of Sunday mornings, in fastening hair bows and in incessant reminders to put shoes on, in the race to get a seat in the sanctuary (VBC--if you know, you know)--remind your soul what it felt like to worship alongside just those you’ve spent every other waking (and sleeping) hour with. You know the “greet-your-neighbor” minute that all the introverts dread? Embrace it! Greet your dang neighbor with genuine hospitality. I can only imagine the cheesy grin I’ll have on my face when we are able to safely gather again. It may be hidden by a mask, but it’ll be there. What a gift it is to love our local church and church body so much that we grieved the absence of it for months. I pray I’ll never forget how much I missed it.

Embrace slowness. Before all this went down, I thought that “being busy” equated to “being productive.” I reveled in a full calendar and felt restless with free time, convincing myself that slow mornings and relaxing nights were time-wasters. Now, we’re forced to be bored, and it’s a glorious thing. Boredom has forced creativity. I’ve made new recipes, relished in nonsense conversations with our toddler, destroyed our seven-year-old in UNO without an ounce of shame, snuggled our new baby without glancing at a device, and read books upon books upon books. I may not have produced as much stuff, but the slower pace has produced precious, unhurried memories. 

Lean into community. Zoom book club meetings, Marco Polo group chats, and six-feet-away conversations suffice, but absolutely nothing compares to being with friends and family in person. The feel of a tight hug cannot be replaced by stilted virtual hangouts. I know you’re tired and your introversion can be an easy excuse to stay in, but it is a privilege to know and be known by people. Don’t take for granted the generosity of God in the form of people to do life alongside. Linger longer on front porches, say “yes” to impromptu Margarita nights, and invite people in. 

Go roam Target. Trust me. And while you’re there, buy an extra pack of toilet paper. Just in case. 

Love,
The Still-Quarantined 2020 You

Missing Community: Bonhoeffer on Facing Loneliness

Written by Vince Oliveri

Last week I wrote an article on discovering community during this crisis. This week I want to offer a few thoughts about facing the absence of community—and I want to draw these thoughts from one of the most formative books in my life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. While this little book is a practical and theological primer on how to live in community, it also offers some rich insights into facing loneliness. Bonhoeffer reminds us that loneliness can lead us into greater fellowship with Christ, shatter our unrealistic and idealistic expectations of community, and teach us how to better cultivate our spiritual life.

Sharing in the Loneliness of Christ

Bonhoeffer begins Life Together with the reminder that community is a grace that we shouldn’t expect or take for granted. We are people who belong to and follow Jesus Christ, who lived in the midst of enemies, was betrayed and abandoned by his closest friends, and faced the pain and terror of the cross in sheer, utter loneliness. As the people of Christ in the world, Christians should expect loneliness.

When we encounter isolation and loneliness, as we likely are during this Covid-19 pandemic, we can remember that Christ has not only gone before us in bearing the greatest loneliness imaginable on the cross, but we can take heart knowing that our great High Priest shares in our exile and bears our loneliness with us. Indeed, the present loneliness of Christians can be seen as a participation in the cruciform divine life of Christ, who was abandoned and cast out so that we might experience his kindness toward us and presence with us.


Shattering our Wish Dreams

Our loneliness can be profitable in many ways. Not only can we better know and experience the presence and work of Christ in our lives, but loneliness can also teach us how to return to community with gratitude and realism. God can use our loneliness to teach us that community found in and through Jesus Christ is a gift of grace that we don’t deserve: “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with fellow Christians.”

God can also use our loneliness to shatter our wish dreams about Christian community. It is easy for us to construct idealistic wish dreams about how our communities should look and operate, and it is easy for us to then hold our actual communities to these unrealistic standards and expectations. Yet these very wish dreams rarely help and often hinder our experience of the actual Christian community God has given us. 

So, it is good news that God can graciously use our time of separation and loneliness to teach us to love and long for our real Christian communities of real people with real struggles—rather than desiring figments of our own broken imaginations. 

Discovering the Goodness of the Day Alone

Redeeming our loneliness can show us how to better be with Christ and others, and it can lead us into a better way of being alone. In the third chapter of Life Together, Bonhoeffer shows why spending time alone plays an essential role in our spiritual formation. Of the many spiritual habits we can practice alone to grow in Christ, Bonhoeffer identifies three in particular: “Scripture meditation, prayer, and intercession.” 

First is Scripture meditation. Bonhoeffer writes, “The time of meditation does not let us down into the void and abyss of loneliness; it lets us be alone with the Word. And in doing so it gives us solid ground on which to stand and clear directions as to the steps we must take… we read God’s Word as God’s Word for us.” According to Bonhoeffer, in meditation we spend time each day alone before a single, short passage of Scripture, actively waiting for God to reveal by his Spirit how the treasures of the gospel revealed in that passage might address us that day. For Bonhoeffer, this doesn’t need to feel special or extraordinary, but our time should be marked by simplicity and fidelity before God.

Second is prayer. Out of our meditation on Scripture, we should offer prayers guided by the words of the Scriptures: “In this way we shall not become the victims of our own emptiness.” Like a child learns to speak by mimicking the words of her parents, so we learn to pray by reciting God’s words back to him. We know that our prayers will be heard because they are a response to and are rooted in the promise of God’s Word, the gospel.

Third is intercession. Out of our praying of Scripture, we pray for one another, though we are apart, because, “a Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.” Intercession for one another, rooted in the Word, must not be vague or abstract, but concrete: “a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore definite petitions.” 

In our loneliness, through meditation, prayer, and intercession, we receive the grace of God, we experience union with others through faith, and we grow in Christ-likeness.

We weren’t ultimately made for exile or isolation, but as the people of Christ in a broken world, we will likely experience loneliness. And when we do, as many of us are in this season, may we take to heart this encouragement from Bonhoeffer to share in the loneliness of Christ, long for the grace of fellowship, and embrace the formative goodness of the day alone. 

Discovering Community in our Present Crisis

Written by Vince Oliveri

This might be an odd time to write about community. Most of the world is quarantined and isolated in our homes in an effort to slow a growing pandemic. Along with facing the more dire threats to our lives and livelihoods, we might also be facing the growing angst and loneliness that come with the loss of normal relationships and social rhythms. 

Perhaps, in this time of social distancing and shelter-in-place, we feel more acutely that God has made us as social creatures, designed to flourish within meaningful relationships. And perhaps, more than ever, we need to remember that the community of the church is central to God’s heart. God is not merely in the business of rescuing individual people in Christ. Rather, God is ultimately in the business of reconciling and restoring a lost, broken, and diverse people—the very people of God—into one body, one family, one company of the gospel called the Church. 

So, I want to offer a few words of encouragement about community, drawn from a snapshot of the first church in Acts 2. In this season of social distancing and longing for community, I believe local churches can follow the example of the first gathered New Testament church and find abundant shared life as they commit to postures of awe, fellowship, and service.

A Community in Awe of God (Acts 2:42–43)

As churches who are scattered rather than gathered, we can remember it is the gospel that unites us—we are made one through the life-saving work of Christ and life-giving work of the Spirit. Churches today, like the first church we encounter in Acts, are communities of people who have been cut to the heart by the gospel and have come to believe in and belong to Christ and his people. As the gospel changes our hearts, we devote ourselves as a community to the Word, to worship, and to prayer. And in this new community, we discover a new posture toward God—awe. This was the Godward posture of the first New Testament church: “awe came upon every soul” (Acts 2:43).

As we sit in our own homes, participating in church services while listening, singing, and praying through the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones, we can still be communities of one heart, drawn together by the gospel, sharing a common awe at the greatness and goodness of God toward us in Christ. This global crisis presents us with the opportunity to renew or develop new rhythms of worship and devotion together in this season of separation.

A Community in Fellowship with One Another (Acts 2:44–46)

As church communities who love God, we grow in our love for one another, even when we aren’t together face to face. Our posture of awe toward God shapes our posture of fellowship with one another. The church in Acts was so devoted to God that they delighted in one another through Christ. They “devoted themselves to the fellowship” and “were together and had all things in common,” (vv. 42, 44). They so loved one another that they daily attended the temple together and broke bread in their homes together with glad and generous hearts (v. 46). Doesn’t that sound wonderful right about now?

While we can’t gather together as the church or have others over for dinner like we desire to, we can still experience fellowship with one another. Whether you have suspended many of your normal rhythms of fellowship or perhaps you haven’t really experienced meaningful community in a long time, I want to encourage you to take this season as a unique opportunity to press into creative expressions of fellowship. My community group through our church, like so many other communities, has taken this time to start meeting together over Zoom calls. Almost counterintuitively, this might be the easiest time to jump into Christian community. Through a simple video call, you can see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices, still wear your comfiest sweatpants on your own couch, eat some ice cream, discuss a Psalm, share and laugh and cry about how you are trying to cope with this season, and pray. 

A Community in Service to Our Neighbors (Acts 2:45–47)

In addition to a posture of awe and fellowship, the first church in Acts had a posture of service toward others. They had open hands and open homes, generously giving to the needy and hospitably welcoming others into their homes. Their generous, hospitable community was a visible witness to the gospel, which God used to draw many lives to himself and his church.

In this season, though we must wisely prioritize safety and distance, we can also be in service and mission to those around us. We can pick up groceries for our needy neighbors and drop them off on their porch, we can call and listen to our friends who might be suffering from loneliness and anxiety, we can give financially to our churches and ministries that are serving the poor and struggling, and we can pray for our neighbors.

While our present forms of community might seem like shadows of the shared life we miss, take heart: this light momentary separation is preparing for us the glory of one day sharing life face to face again. Even more, this season of distance is better training our longing hearts for the next world where we will be with Him face to face.