Community: Gift & Task

Welcome Jess de Groot, PULSE volunteer and blogger for this week. Jess speaks eloquently about the challenges and rewards of putting effort into understanding the communities in which we live and work:

Four months into my PULSE experience, one realization that has continually resurfaced for me is how people are formed very deeply—and differently—by their life experiences. I live in a community with three others I did not know before we met at the start of our PULSE year. We all come from very different backgrounds: I am from the rolling countryside of Maryland, Hannah is from Guam, Kateri from Dayton, and Demarcus from St. Louis.

In our first month together, one of the challenges we faced was learning how to hear each other's experiences and truly understand from where they are coming. It dawned on me that before PULSE, we each had learned how to communicate in different "languages." Yes, we all speak English. But because of the very different home and college experiences we had, we also had different understandings of concepts and ideas. Simply talking about "community" or "intentionality" was confusing, because those words held different meanings and implications for each of us. We dedicated a lot of time and energy in our first two months learning how to understand each other. It was a process of staying at the table—literally, during our community meetings—when we had difficulty getting on the same page.

Now, I think our community has the unique strength of truly hearing and supporting one another because we have chosen to cultivate this strength. It has been beautiful to watch how we each have softened, come together, and created a language of our own.

The idea of softening toward a middle ground and choosing to stand through discomfort is part of my daily experience at work. Not in a bad way--in a wisdom kind of a way. I have simply come to realize that an atmosphere of comfort rarely gives enough space or motivation for true growth. I work at Victory Project, a faith-based after school program for teenage boys. I could not be more different from the boys I serve. I am a female who went to a high school that was surrounded by corn fields and cows. They live in poverty-stricken urban areas struggling with a heroin epidemic. Despite our differences, each day we show up and choose to spend time together. 

It is easy to be a good friend, a good person, a good community member, when you are serving people who are just like you. If I have learned one thing from my experience so far, it is that when you find yourself uncomfortable and hesitant of your abilities, it is likely God is calling you to do some good, hard work. He is also asking you to trust He will fill in the gaps. He will qualify whomever He calls.

I’d like to share a quote that recently spoke to me. It seems to sum up these musings.

God Bless,

Jess

"You are so young. You stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as much as I can to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot be given to you, you could not live with them. It is a question of experiencing everything: you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day." -Rainer Maria Rilke