Intentionality and Closure

For our community day event yesterday Sarah, James and I met with the director of Fair Trade Chicago to discuss what fair trade is, the implications of ethical consumption, and the constant negotiations of feasibility and intentionality that come with a global-sized lens on daily activities.  This discussion marked the first of our last season of community days which will be focused on intentional living, intentional acts, and intentionality beyond our year(s)-of-service.  The first week of June has already come and gone, and August is rapidly approaching.  We are each nearing the end of another chapter of our lives.

After our meeting, we had lunch at First Church with Krista.  Our check-in discussion addressed where we are and how we want to be together and individually as we start closing out our year together.  We have a little over two months left together, and each of us responds to an upcoming transition with different expectations and different needs.  How are we going to live faithfully and compassionately together in the present as we approach different futures?

The resulting discussion of intentionality, community, and closure was rich with truth-telling, open sharing, differences of opinion and the constant negotiations and compromises that make up communal relating.  Whenever we sit down to discuss anything of substance together, I am always struck by the remarkable differences represented by each of us in our remaining community of three.  Such a small community, with such big challenges!  Our group discussions on how to be community with one another, honoring individual and collective well-being, are rarely "perfect," sometimes awkward, sometimes tense, sometimes full of laughter.  Striving to fully understand the other while attempting to hold onto my own take on what is sacred - the whole process sounds an awful lot like "big c" Church to me.

What is the global Church but a really big intentional Christ-ian community, trying its best to wrestle faithfully with Jesus' call to just relationship while struggling to hold onto particular slices of the sacred, that can at times seem incompatible?  There is joy in striving to relate intentionally and with love, there is pain in bumping up against important differences in priority and integrity, and there is always an abundance of grace that can only come from the Divine which occasionally makes something beautiful out of something so broken.

How do we negotiate faithful relating as we approach the future, keeping in mind the past, while attempting to always honor and return to the present moment with our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits?  Somewhere between the posture of intentionality and the hope in a peace which passes all understanding, we are called to continue answering these questions with our daily choices, big and small.