When Community Gets Stomped On
WORDS FROM W.W. March 29, 2016
What does it mean to “be community?” It is a term that gets used often these days, an ideal that gets raised as something people want, but what does it mean?
If you go to some of our more rural areas you’ll find that there are farms, or what used to be farms, often situated on each corner of a crossroads. It’s an interesting picture that describes a learning that farmers from decades ago discovered as an essential principle for living: They needed each other. Instead of building the farm house in the middle of their property, farmers built their homes close to their neighbors. Isolation was a threat to their existence. When they planted in the spring they helped each other. When they harvested they helped each other. If a new barn needed to be built they helped each other.
Community meant knowing that they needed each other! Life wasn’t about hoarding, and it wasn’t about looking out for a person’s own interests…and the heck with everyone else!
Such life wisdom was also weaved through scripture into God’s design of the church. There was to be the dependence on God and the interdependence on one another. In fact, the church was charged to look out for the needs of those who were without, especially the widows (Of which there were many!) and the orphans. Community meant sharing. There was not to be those who had and those who had not.
That idea of community often receives lip service, but, in a culture that is self-focused, it is seldom put into action.
Sadly enough, a free Easter Egg Hunt in Orange, Connecticut, demonstrated that the wants of the individual are more important than the welfare of the community. Outside of the Peez candy business pushy parents said to heck with it and rushed the fields that held over nine thousand Easter eggs. Children were pushed to the side as adults descended “like locusts”, as one Peez employee described it, on the fields.
You may be saying “What!!!!” at this point!
The event was scheduled to happen in three phases, starting with the youngest children at 10:30, but before 10:30 arrived mayhem moved in first! The result…crying children, angry parents, and a lot of questions.
Over plastic eggs filled with candy!
The principle of community got stomped on!
A couple of my favorite passages from the New Testament come in Acts 2 and Acts 4 where, talking about the first church in Jerusalem, the writer Luke says that no one was in need. If there was someone in need the others made sure they were taken care of.
That’s the kind of community I want to be a part of- the sweetness of agape love over the momentary taste of sweet candy!
Explore posts in the same categories: Bible, children, Christianity, Community, Jesus, love, Parenting, Story, Teamwork, The Church, Uncategorized, YouthTags: candy, Connecticut, Easter Egg hunt, Easter Eggs, helping one another, mayhem, needy people, Orange, Peez, pushy parents, those in need
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