Community

Over the last year, I've heard a lot about community. The church has to exist in community - we support one another in crisis, at least we mean to, and we sharpen one another in conflict, the old iron sharpens iron thing. I heard of a group that are trying to take that further and live in the same neighborhood with their small group and share living in a more daily way. Even in the secular world you hear a lot about community service or doing work for charitable and rescue operations.

Well, we have been in our town home in a three street development on the edge of a village near our office for almost four weeks now. The "backyards" all are postage stamp terraces that touch one another and the windows of our homes look out over all the yards and directly to the other houses across the yard. When you sit on the patio, you can hear conversation going on all around. Yesterday when I was upstairs I could hear a child playing a flute or recorder somewhere. All the sounds and noises seem to carry through the homes and the, currently, open windows.

So far the neighbors have been very stand offish which is very different from our last experience here in Spain. They seem to have some strong reservations about us, the new neighbors, but when I see how overlapped they are in their living I can understand that it will take some proving ourselves to be accepted into the "community." It will be interesting to see if we can earn our place on the block.