Blog 4: Community

Blog 4: Community

7/7/19

As we’ve officially finished the first half of our internship and are now only three weeks out from the end of the program, I’ve been contemplating life afterwards.  This eight-week experience has changed me, allowing me to grow in a supportive setting and learn lots of lessons.  This past week I’ve continued to land on the word community.  This community has helped me to tackle living with others, building healthy relationships, and facing uncomfortable situations in a way that brings forward honesty, empathy, and problem solving. 

In one of our readings, it lists out the stages of community.  Psuedo-community, chaos, emptiness, and community, in reading it I was certain I would come across a paragraph that would force me to see that we had not quite reached the stage of true community because we had not been through chaos yet.  However, as I read through emptiness, I saw that we had started there.  We were led into this intentional community leaving as much bias at the door as we could and bringing perspective to the forefront of our minds.  Community usually takes months or years to build, but living in intentional community, it happens so much more quickly.  Though we’ve only known each other five weeks, we know so much more about each other because of the spaces of vulnerability that have been set up for us.  I’m so grateful to all the program coordinators for leading us through this process and allowing us to learn lessons in relationship building so early in life.  Not every situation is pleasant.  Sometimes things get awkward, because as the sign in our chaplain’s residence says, ‘Living with others is HARD.’, but we’ve been led through those situations with thoughtfulness, prayer, and open spaces to be vulnerable and speak our truths.  Honestly, before this internship, I thought the saying, ‘speak your truth’ was a little silly, but here I’ve found meaning in it.  Speaking from I perspectives, not giving advice or jumping, but speaking your own experience and being there to listen to someone else’s is such a crucial part to building strong, healthy bonds. 

I’m excited to carry these lessons and practices home with me, to improve my current relationships and build these practices into my new relationships as they come along.

-Helen