Together. Apart.

Source.

I put this book on hold at the library before Ash Wednesday, thinking it would be a good Lenten read. My turn to borrow it finally came up yesterday, with less than a week of Lent left to read it in. Oops.

I'm staring at the cover, now,* instead of reading it. For a few weeks I've been in one of those seasons when I walk through a dense fog of numbness, and while on so very many levels it's better than some of the alternatives, it means that words like Life Together jangle around in my head and can't find a place to belong. What does life together mean when you are forever apart?

I know that's not what the book is about. I don't know how familiar I'll be with the words inside until I open it up and read it, but this is a book Chadwick loved and talked about often, so I'm sure I'll meet some old friends inside. I know this isn't a book about that relationship. It's about community, and I'm nothing if not wildly enthusiastic about embracing my community. But this is something Chadwick and I shared--one reason I never read it was because he loved to tell me about it. And now I'm about to read about being together, alone.

I thank God every day for the community I have. A church family who are some of the best on the planet, coworkers who I don't understand how I'm so lucky to spend every day with. (We have some new folks who have absolutely brightened my past couple of weeks. To say nothing of the ones I already knew were bright.) I don't know how this happened, but there's a part of me that thinks that life together is already going pretty great, and I'm not sure how one little book will make it any better.

So. I'd better crack this thing open and find out. I'm sure the library still has a waitlist of other people who need it, too.

Maybe one of them is you. What's your community like?

*Unrelated tangent: there's an actor who I like, who I follow across all his public social media accounts, who has a strange relationship with commas. Sometimes it's all I can do to hold back from telling him that I'm taking all his commas away until he learns what they're for. Other times, like now, I find the urge to slip in an extra comma à la that guy too strong to resist. Sometimes it's more comforting than frustrating, so I can see why he's embraced it.