community

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. — 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

One ordinary day my wife Rosemary and I were eating lunch as our baby slept in the next room. By the end of that ordinary day, I would be sitting in a hospital waiting room surrounded by friends and family, praying Katherine would survive emergency brain surgery.

Rosemary and I grew up in the Bible Belt and rarely spent a Saturday morning outside of a church pew, but I’m not sure I had truly experienced the fullness of what the community of Christ could be until I sat in that waiting room. 

It’s not when everything is perfect that we experience our purest form of connection to God and to others. Opportunity for true connection happens when reality splinters in a hospital waiting room, when your twenty-six year-old wife has a stroke without warning, when life balances on the edge of a surgeon’s scalpel. 

In that space of recognizing our own helplessness, we can either find ourselves in despair or find ourselves released into something bigger than ourselves — the safety net of each other. When we cried out to God, He answered. He gave us Himself by giving us other people. 

When our lives fracture, God is making space for His people to fill in the gaps.