I have been struggling of late with an ability to get words on paper (ok, simulated pixel paper). I think, for the most part, my head has not been in the best place for a myriad of reasons. I have been procrastinating writing anything other than my daily devotional while I have tried to let my mind settle down. In writing my daily devotional I have also realized that I have not been internalizing what I write there either.

Then we get hit with this pandemic.

Boy talk about something messing with your head even more!

Like everyone else I am not sure what the coming days, weeks and months will bring. And what I am having to really wrap my head around more than ever is that God is in control and I need to rest my mind on that fact.

But from an extensible standpoint this is a time for us to better understand and leverage our community.

Now, before you hit me up on the need for “social distancing” I am not advocating that we rush out and get together with our community. What I am asking you to consider is how you are keeping in touch with your community, for in our community we are stronger than we are alone.

Before I get to far let me address for some the elephant in the room. Do you even have a community and what is the true definition of community in this electronic age?

Community today is not what I grew up with living in small town Texas before the internet age. Small towns are not functioning through this pandemic (for the most part) like major cities. It is not that they do not have the same concerns but that they are experiencing it differently.

Small towns, at least in Texas, tend to be very close-knit communities. When something impacts one many come to their aid. I experienced this many times when I was growing up. My family reached out to those who experienced difficult times and we would also take time to check on one another frequently.

Our “communities” now tend to be much looser and far more electronic than what I experienced back then. However, communities are still what we have.

Some will argue that they are loners and do not have a community. Well, speaking as one who does not have a lot of friends, I do have a fairly large community. Aside from my close friends, who may be few, I have a church community, a biker community and a gun community. These are groups of people I interact with regularly and to whom I am close to and friendly with even if we are not fast friends.

If we look around us just a bit we will realize that we all have more “communities” than we first imagine. Groups who, if we were to call upon in desperate times, would come to our aid and we would come to their aid.

This is the true value of community that we need to recognize and remember in these difficult times. They will especially become more critical as the outcome of this pandemic lengthens.

Our communities are the bedrock of our society. While we may be in a time where we cannot necessarily be close within our society, we can take the time to foster and further the touch in our communities.

This will combat the loneliness a situation like this creates. This will combat the fear that the possible outcome of a situation like this breeds. Further, it allows us to fight off anxiety around an unsure future that, right now, none of us has the foresight to predict.

As I write this I am sitting on my back patio. It is cool and damp as last nights rain clouds still blanket the sky. The trees are in full bloom with the expectation of spring in stark contrast to the bleakness of what we hear in the news. It is a stark reminder that the earth renews no matter what. It is unaffected by our trivial concerns over tomorrow. And, unless God comes back today, it will do the same tomorrow and the day after that, and so on.

I am not tying to lessen the impact this event is having on any of our lives only putting it into perspective. The world moves on, as we will. Tomorrow may bring differences to our world and I am not overly sure that is a bad thing. We should use this time to recognize and change behavior that is not productive. Use this time to create and grow and not allow it to simply sap and wither. The world renews and we will as well. Possibly changed but renewed.

While this is an unprecedented event within our current history it is easy to forget how we allow ourselves to settle into the doldrums of a life of routine and without substance. We go from day to day with little thought, on autopilot and the days, months and years pass with little change to our routines. Then something major happens and we are taken by surprise. Life changes in a moment.

I am not sure any of us will come through this period without some aspect of change in our lives, and maybe that is a good thing. Maybe we needed a bit of a wake-up call to help us to understand a bit more about our place on this planet and within the lives of others. To get out of our cocoons.

It is easy for us to go about our daily lives and not give a second thought to those experiencing hardship until we all do. Then suddenly it is all too real and too important to not recognize. It is no longer happening at arm’s length to “them” but is now impacting “us”. And in its coming close we begin to realize the very short distance between the known and the unknown.

Suddenly, community is everything. We begin to realize that we are not isolated from each other but all part of something bigger, something more connected than we understood. Our money palaces are torn down and we are left with ourselves and each other…and we need each other.

Something like these levels the playing field, if only for a time. It provides a context in life that we must all recognize and allow it to tear down some of the walls we have erected. It creates the context within each of our lives as to whether we give into the chaos or come together and work to build something stronger to hold us together.

That something is our communities.