Let’s Talk Community
Welcome to the very first blog of Brave Minds Blossom. If you’re reading this, I want to welcome you and also thank you for being here and checking out my very first blog post. Let’s do it shall we?
I have a question for you first up. I know, I know, I’m getting you to think. Truthfully, I don’t always like answering questions, especially ones that require me to display a level of vulnerability (hint hint)…but I do in fact love asking them. I always find you learn a lot about someone by asking questions and I love learning about people: who they are, what they love, what makes them tick…I love it all…I’m a very curious person. I’ll be that person that inquisitively looks around and has the urge to touch and open everything when I step into a new environment. Yes. I’m that person.
But....moving along to my question.
My question for you is...have you ever felt like you have no one around you?
As if it’s just you standing in the eye of a tornado, and everything is swirling and whirling crazily around you and you literally cannot do anything to stop it or grab anything or anyone? I have.
More often than maybe I care to wish to admit. But I have. Anyone else with me?
Whenever I’ve thought about this, if I could summarise it into a term, then I seem to come back to land on…COMMUNITY.
Community can be defined as “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common” or “the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common”.
Quick side note about me…I love defining and unpacking things in depth. I blame it on my curiosity.Anyway, back to community. Two things stand out to me in its definition, and I want to unpack them further.
The first thing is “group of people”. Community consists of a group of people. It’s plural. It’s multiple. It’s not just one…not just one person. It’s not just you. To have community, and to be in community, requires more than just one person: more than just yourself. I think many can miss this and try to do life alone. Perhaps going about life thinking they can do everything themselves. Or perhaps they have been so hurt and broken by other people they can’t or don’t want to trust anyone again. Maybe this sounds like you or has been you.
I want to say that's fair enough if that is you. That's been me before.
You know what's so great though? That even though you've experienced hurts, you may have had fractured relationships, you may have doubts and fears…there are also the opposites of them to experience. There are good and healthy communities and relationships. I would also say that healing and restoration can happen in your life.
I believe that doing life by yourself is actually very hard to do. It’s tiring. It’s draining. It’s boring. It’s lonely. At some point I have no doubt you would crash and go “I need someone to do this with” or “I wish I could share this with someone” or “I don’t want to do this by myself”.
Now I don’t just write this loosely; I write this with personal experience. I was left very hurt by a broken-down friendship. I felt as if I had been dumped and discarded without a second glance. I wondered what I’d done. What had I said? What about me wasn’t good enough for them? And I vowed I didn’t want to feel like that again. So…I built up walls and became wary in building relationships and friendships. I consistently reminded myself that I could get hurt again, that maybe they’d just disappear on me, and I’d be left alone. I tried to do life alone. And it was hard. It was exhausting. It was lonely. It was worse than the friendship breakdown to be honest. Over time I gradually let down my walls (with a lot of help) and I re-created community. So that I wasn’t standing frozen in time watching the world spin around me.
The second thing I want to unpack is “the condition of sharing”. Community includes the action of sharing. And sharing…well that requires more than one person. When you’re in community you get the opportunity to share your life with others. To learn off others. To teach others. Personally, if I couldn’t share my life with the people in my community, I would get bored. And lonely. And life would be dull. I mean I’d never easily have the opportunity to share my thoughts with others. To teach others what I’m learning. I’d never learn from others that I intentionally put myself around. It’d always be about just me. And goodness knows I can get quite sick of myself sometimes so that wouldn’t go too well I don’t think. Anyone else agree?
Here, do something real quick for me. Imagine something for me. Can you imagine you win a prize whilst you’re at school? You accept it and put it away in your bag to take home with you. You are so excited, but that joy slowly evaporates as you realise that for the next 4 hours until home time it’s just going to sit in your bag, hidden away, because you don’t have a community around you to share about it with. You only had yourself to turn to and share it with. And that’s done because you already know! You were the one who won it.
Now, can you imagine that you win that prize at school, you accept it, and you keep it with you because the first thing you want to do at breaktime is show your friends…your community? You see them and you go “Hey, look, I won this prize!” And you’re met with your community rejoicing with you. They get to be excited for you, with you. They get to congratulate you. To love on you. To cheer you. To walk alongside you in your moment of joy. You had that community to turn to and share it with.
I know what option I would rather. What about you? If you had to pick one of these options, which one would you pick?
Alright, so I have studied psychology so let me throw in some research evidence as to how important community is. Community and social relationships have been shown to increase life span and better individuals’ health; leading individuals to live longer and have fewer health issues, such as heart disease and depression (Umberson & Montez, 2010). Social relationships also naturally influence health behaviours and habits (Umberson & Montez, 2010), positive or negative I’ll note. For example, a friend could engage in regular physical exercise, and you then become influenced and motivated to engage in regular exercise too. Just you being in community with that friend, impacted and motivated you to create a healthy life choice; where without the community with that friend, you may never have engaged in regular exercise. Healthy relational communities' impact and are so beneficial to our physical health, our emotional health, and our psychological well-being.
I am also a Christian and my relationship with Christ is the most important thing in my life so I’ll often be adding in some solid truth...what God and scripture says about whatever I’m sharing on.
If that’s not “your thing”…can I encourage you to continue reading and just see how you find it? You may be surprised.
God did not create us to do life alone. God didn’t create us to do life alone at all. When our Heavenly Father created man, He said “It’s not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.” (Genesis 2:18). From the beginning God knew that by ourselves we would not be good and so He purposefully and intentionally created a helper that would be alongside the first man He created here on earth, Adam. God knew, because He is all knowing, that we here on earth would need groups of people around us. We would need people to share our lives with. We would need people to smile with us. To rejoice with us. To cry with us. To be angry with us. To grieve with us. To battle trials with. We, you, and me, would need a community. He knew that we would be, and are most definitely, better together, doing life alongside one another, than we ever could be alone (Romans 12:4-5).
“But I do have people around me and I still feel like I’m walking alone.” Maybe you’re reading this and thinking exactly that. Can I just say...that is okay. You are not alone. I know many people who have felt that way. I’ve felt that way. Can I also say...it won’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Good or bad, nothing lasts forever. I have a tattoo that says, “This too shall pass”. I fully believe it and I always look at it when I need the reminder.
(PSA: that’s not me telling you to go out and get a tattoo…don’t rush that…unlike our feelings, they are a permanent thing haha).So, for those of you in that season, I would encourage you to talk to someone about how you’re feeling. Whether it’s a family member, a close friend, a trusted leader in your life, a psychologist or counsellor…take a bold and brave step and share with someone.
Community is so important to us living a healthy and fulfilling life. Over the years, I have developed a deeper appreciation and love for community, realising how important it is for us to thrive and live healthy, enriching lives.
My heart for Brave Minds Blossom is to create a community for people.
A place to engage with others.
A place to share with each other.
A place to empower and encourage one another.
A place to discover all the beauty that lies within our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits.
A place to grow together into our best selves.
So, welcome again to Brave Minds Blossom. To this community. I am so glad you are here. Here’s to each of you, each of us, finding the courage to step out boldly, to delve into and unpack our thoughts and feelings, and to blossom and grow into all that we are called to be. Let’s do it together. As a community.