My wife and I really started to get involved in community groups with other believers about 13 years back and it profoundly changed our lives. Getting to know other believers and being able to talk with others about Jesus, while living in the world, was so refreshing to us. It grew us immensely, but we started to wrestle with something. The time that we set aside for church began to get full and we began to feel stressed. How on earth were we going to have personal fellowship with other believers when we were going to church on Sunday, bible study Monday, and Community Group on Wednesday? That was three days out of our week automatically gone, and that didn’t include anything we were doing extra curricular outside of church. The feeling was that there was just too much to do and there was no time to rest.
We tried to go deeper on Sunday’s and Wednesday’s, but with the amount of people that we were there and the activities of those times, it kept us from really diving deep with anyone. Or, if we dove deep, it was about what we believed on this subject or what was going on during our week. Our ability to actually get to know someone’s heart was very limited and that is what we were really wanting with other believers.
When true community and fellowship goes deep it brings you to a point where you know someone’s heart and can love on them. It can be messy and raw. It’s uncomfortable sometimes but most importantly it takes time and intentional living. If we live our lives with complete control of our time, activities, and social image then we could very likely miss true community and God’s use of the body in the way that it was truly intended.
So what did we do? We wrestled over what was important to us and we decided that we would do whatever it took to get to KNOW people. We changed our hearts as a couple, and as a family, and began to find family time in the times that we were hanging others. We made our time more flexible as well. If someone called us out of the blue to hang out, we did it! Granted, we didn’t chuck family time all together, as it is very important to us, but we stopped seeing time with others as something that was keeping us from rest. We opened ourselves up to being sacrificial in our time and we instantly saw growth in our relationships.