Why Waco?

A post of Rishi's prompted me to realize that, as of this week, our family has been in Waco for 7 years. Wow. That's more than half of Aaron's and my marriage, and the majority of our kids' lives. We moved here for the promise of friendship and a deeper experience in church, and hoo-boy! Have we found it. I'm smiling as I write this, not just because of the good stuff, but because of the hard stuff.

It's freaking hard living in community. It's messy, and people misunderstand and are misunderstood. It's hard pursuing others and being pursued. It's so much easier to sit in our living rooms and be isolated.

But how incredibly, beautifully, miraculously rewarding it is to be in community. To pursue when we don't want to, to love when we don't have love to give, to give when we want to take, to fail and be picked back up again by those who surround us. To see living examples of how we are truly, deeply, really not alone in all this.

I don't want to sugar coat it, so really, the best example I can give is marriage. Community, like marriage, is really hard. There's a certain brand of pain that only happens when in a fight with your spouse, because only your spouse can make you that angry, or push those certain buttons. Being in community can be like that. Being vulnerable makes us able to hurt each other, intentionally or not. But the reward . . . wow. The reward of being that close to someone, or to a body of people, is incomparable soul food. There's a richness, a security, an incredible, life-changing love.

So, yeah, no regrets here.