Better Together

This past weekend was rich with community.  

It began at the Abbey of the Heights in downtown Tulsa.  My spiritual direction cohort met on Friday and Saturday, and while I’ve only known this group for about a year and a half, we have covered a lot of ground together, and it always feels like a delight to be with them.  

We are learning together about what it is to walk with people in a kind and compassionate way - to notice the stories of others and to enter into that space with intentional listening and deep love.  

We are vulnerable with one another as we talk about what resonated with us in the books we’ve been reading and the work we’ve been doing since we saw each other last.  And we are vulnerable as we share what stirred resistance in us.  We ask questions of each other, and we learn from one another because we are all coming to this space differently.  

The pace is slow.  There is room to breathe.  To feel.  To wonder.  To reflect.  

We eat meals together.  We read Scripture together.  We pray together.  We laugh.  We cry.  We celebrate.   

We are better because we have been together.      

Then, on Saturday evening, I got to sit around a different table with five friends who have been in my life for decades.  

We haven’t been in the same room together for far too long.  Life has been full and, at times, exhausting, and the spaces where we used to intersect regularly have changed.  

But as we sat down to dinner and began to talk, we entered into the kind of easy conversation that comes from having lived a lot of life together.  

There was an easy comradery as we sat at that table for hours.  We caught up on what’s going on right now.  We reminisced about times gone by.  We joked.  We laughed.  We lamented.  We hoped.  

And then we made a plan to meet again.  Because being together fills us up.  

These two gatherings this weekend were different and served different purposes, and yet both of them were deeply life-giving.  

Neither of these gatherings would have happened without intentionality.  

Every person I spent time with this weekend had to carve out time in their schedule to be able to show up.  

And they did because it mattered to them to be there.  

I think most of us want to be deeply connected with others, but it can be hard to figure out how to develop those connections.  When we boil it down, community always requires intentionality.  

Make the plans.  Invite the people.  Carve out the time.  

We need each other.  We are better together. 

~  Melissa