maggiekalinowski - Community

I have been pondering questions lately; asking myself what is community and why live in community. The very thing I came to GA to do; live in community with other believers.

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42They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

ACTS 2:42-47

I think of this passage every time I think of community. When arriving here in GA our group went over this passage, wanting to make it our foundation for how we live.

Living in community is not a normal thing of today's society. I don't believe that Americans know how to live in community. In school or even at church, we aren't taught how to get along with other people or how to share or be thankful.

Coming to ComLife has been challenging for our whole group, some more for others. You throw eight people together that all have different backgrounds/lives and try to unite them together on the grounds of Act 2. Wow, can you say difficult! For me I thought last week was very difficult for our group. We were all doing our own individual thing, our relationships with each other were not deepening and that is not what God calls community. When someone had a problem our team wasn't embracing the person or the problem, and we weren't bringing it before the Lord.

Unfortunate for me, God had chosen me to be the one who would go before the group to say how things were going. I did not want to be that person, for many reasons. One of the main reasons, when coming into comlife I knew I was going to be one of the youngest people in the house. I had this idea that I would learn so much from all the people older than me and I could just be a follower for once in my life. God had different plans for me.

I started to pray that God would somehow make it easy for me to talk to the group or bring about a situation that would bond us together. So one morning during our prayer time I decided to talk to the group. But than my roommate, Rosy was saying how she had a neck ache. We decided to pray over her to heal her and she mentioned how she was frustrated with the group. This was the opening that God had make for me and I began to share more about how our group needed to unite in order to make community work. By the end of our morning Rosy no longer had that neck ache. This week has been good and I feel as though our group is being more intentional with each other. Praise God!

This is just a funny pic of my friends! We are just having fun!