Community

The second prompt that I like from Reverb 10 is from December 7th: Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010?  What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

The community that I have been the most involved with in 2010 is my young adult group at my church.  We call ourselves TNT, which stands for Twenties 'N Thirties.  I did not discover TNT in 2010, we got started a little over five years ago, but it has been a big part of my life this past year.  Over the last five years the group has been growing and changing.  There have been a lot of marriages and serious dating relationships that have come together as a result of TNT.  We even have a new baby in our midst, and another one on the way.

Though all this has been wonderful to witness, the fact that I only witness it has been a bit disappointing.  I am not the only one who is still single in the group, but it still bothers me a bit.  There is no one in the group that I am interested in, however, so I don't think I will become one of the TNT couples.

Other than that one little issue, I have loved the group.  Through TNT I have made some good Christian friends, people I actually hang out with outside of church.  It is such a blessing to have friends, my own age, who are practicing Christians.  As much as I love my other non-Christian friends, and I do love them a lot, sometimes it is just so much easier to be around my friends from church.  One of the biggest differences, and one that I appreciate the most, is that the topic of sex rarely, if ever, comes up.  With my other friends, our conversations almost always end up on this topic.  We end up talking about what new guy so-and-so slept with this week, or they start pestering someone else about whether she and her boyfriend have "done it" yet, and so on.

I don't mind these conversations once in a while, because I want my friends to share their lives with me, but we talk about it all the time.  Every time we get together as a group the topic comes up as some point in the evening.  Eventually it gets old for me because I have nothing to contribute to that conversation.  But it's more than that.  It is the attitude associate with the sex conversation.  It is never stated, and I know my friends would never say this to me, but I get the impression from the conversation that if you are not having sex then your life must be deficient in some way.  Even though one of my friends is married, sex is never discussed as something intimate to share with a significant other.  I have very different views on sex than they do, but I don't feel comfortable bringing my thoughts into the conversation because I know they are not valued.  I am fairly certain that some of them would look down on my opinion and see it as naive wishful thinking that only someone who has never experienced sex would have, rather than a legitimate, and equally valuable, alternative view of sex.

With my church friends, there is an unspoken, but shared belief about sex.  With them it is not a bad thing to abstain from sex, there is no pressure to hurry up and get some, and no one is pestering new couples if they have done it yet.  Conversation just feels easier because I am not seen as the cute, goodie-goodie  token Christian in the group.  With friends from church we are all on the same page.

I don't mean to speak badly of my non-Christian friends because they have been tremendous friends to me and we have a long history together, much longer than any of my Christian friends.  Most of the time we all get along great, but sometimes it becomes painfully obvious to me that there is a big difference between us.  I wish with all my heart, and I pray constantly, that my non-Christian friends would come to know Christ.  I do not think that I have been a great witness to them over the years, but I hope I have made some impression, however small.