Community living

I would like to focus today on what it is like living community style, the way that so many people around the world live today, and have lived for thousands of years. I find more and more everyday that I relate to Jesus and his disciples. He had 12 disciples and other followers who lived, slept, ate and traveled together. They lived in a community. Not only were the disciples friends of Jesus, they lived with him, they knew everything about him. When he taught, they understood his mannerisms, even if they didn’t necessarily understand what he was teaching. They were intimate with him. They knew him. Living in a house with others I am beginning to know them and love them too.

It is said that we don’t get to choose our family, we are born into it. We get to choose our friends, but or family is almost forced onto us, yet somehow we almost always end up being more intimate with our family that we had no choice in choosing. God knows what he was doing when he placed our families together, and he knew what he was doing when he placed my DTS house together. He knew that we would get along and learn to live together. He knew.

What is it like for those of you that have never experienced such a phenomenon? Well at first I viewed it as camp because of the bunk beds and schedule, then I saw it as more of a college dorm experience. Now? We are just a family. We have bedrooms that we share, we have a kitchen, we have chores. But we live here. We are comfortable. I find that I am no longer paranoid about going to breakfast in the morning without doing my hair or changing my pajamas. My roommates and I are comfortable to share shelves and intermix our things, she computers, scarves, we are one. We are family. At times it can be entertaining because we represent so many different cultures. For instance, the couple from new Zealand call dinner, tea. So we have breakfast, tea time, lunch, tea, then tea. But for the last tea we don’t have any tea, it is dinner. Or my friend from England calls pants trousers and underwear, pants. The cooking staff all have different tastes as to what should go into spaghetti and to us Americans, the floor just doesn’t look like it needs moped for the 3rd time today. There are always conversations, screaming and laughing, five different selections of music blasting, fingers flying over keyboards, toast burning in the toaster, too many shoes by the door, and a thousand other things going on - but that makes it entertaining.

But what is interesting is that we are united. We don’t live out our bedrooms, we live in the house, together, with the common goals. Together we choose to have nights of prayer. Together we have dinner dates and trips on the train. We pray together, we laugh together, we dream. I feel like I have a whole crude of siblings. We have leaders, but they are more like older sisters. The directors are like the parents, but they don’t live in the house with us. I was thinking on how living in a house without parents would immediately sound like a party scene - but I think it makes us more responsible, we look after each other. We go to sleep, we clean the kitchen, we lock the doors. I feel safe when I am here because I am surrounded by so many who care, we all joke about going home and how we will feel lonely without so many siblings around. I know this is an experience that will follow me forever. This part of the experience have nothing to do with being in another country, it has everything to do with simply changing my immediate surroundings - it is simply a plus that I get to experience it while in another country.