City of Grace Mesa

By Adam J. Smith

Connecting. Discovering community. Getting plugged-in. Chances are, if you're breathing and looking hard enough, you see one of your top priorities buried inside one of these churchy catch phrases. (By the way, if you're not breathing, please discontinue reading this article immediately and get that checked out-seriously.)

I know it doesn't exactly come off as this big, flashy, brain-inflating theological discovery. But it's true. So much so that it almost doesn't even need to be stated. We all want to belong-to be noticed; to feel like people genuinely care about us; to be missed when we're not around; to be known in such a way that when certain little, funny instances emerge in your absence, someone is Xeroxing the moment in their brain because they can't wait to relay it to you word-for-word just to hear the quirky way you laugh. These things are all so completely true about all of us and yet they seem so difficult to really grab hold of. How can it be that we all want the same thing and yet most seem not to have it?

Friendship.

Right? I mean, that's really what we're talking about here. We all want friends-real friends. We just can't say it like that because we're adults now. Somehow, somewhere along the grand timeline of your existence it became socially taboo to admit it in simple, plain English-the way it becomes seemingly inappropriate play with Legos once you hit High School. These things are unspokenly banned from the norm. So, we go about repackaging it and call it by some other churched-up name, but that's what it is-plain, old friendship.

This is the great mission of the church. This is the big puzzling dilemma we pastors sit around reading thick, big-worded books and debating about. This is what all our fancy programs are constructed and reconstructed to foster-friends. This is what it is to "love one another". Think about the relationship you want from the closest friend you can imagine having-that's what love is: intimate friendship. Yet, week after week, churches all over the world are full of people who file in and never truly experienced it.

So, what's the big secret? I can't say that I know for sure. But, I like how Jesus tackled the issue. He rounds up a handful of people, has them set aside and leave behind everything reminiscent of the comfortable lives they'd become accustom and hauls them off on an extended road trip in which the focus is everyone but themselves. And it worked.

It still works.

There's something overwhelmingly bonding about actively peeling selfish thinking from the corridors of your life in front of a company of others all doing the same. It changes you. It puts you in a position to finally be the kind of friend you've always wanted to have. And then, miraculously friendship finds you-I mean, "community/connectivity/plugged-in-edness".

Last year I took 12 people who barely knew each other with me to spend a week in a remote orphanage in Nicaragua. I returned just 8 days later with a group who discovered half-way around the world the thing they had been so desperately fumbling for at home-friends. It wasn't why they went. But in the end, it was their reward. Now, nearly a year later, they're almost all still close; exceptionally so.

That Jesus-he really knew what he was doing.

This June, I'm taking another group of students to New York City. It's been fun assembling their applications and penning their names on a growing list of what will soon become their closest friends. I smile because I know they're only a few short months from coming face-to-face with the kind of relationships they've always wanted. I know that inside of 7 days this June, as they place their search for friendship on hold to serve AIDS victims, orphans, the homeless, the hurried and the hurting of New York City-it will unexpectedly find them.

I smile because I know what they can't possibly know. And I can't wait for them to find out.