From Christianity Today online.
Like Alan, though, we have felt the ground beneath the ladder shift from time to time. Maybe we saw it coming—a move to a new school, an internship in a new city, a long-hoped-for marriage to someone half a world away. Or maybe, like Alan, it blindsided us—a company transfer, a slouch in the economy, a sudden divorce. Whether as a result of carefully laid plans or catastrophic interruptions, few of us seem able to stay in one place anymore. Maybe we have survived the moves. (In some cases, our survival seems almost as miraculous as Alan’s.) We’re still alive, but our spirits are hungry. We long for connection with God and other people. We’re desperate for community. We’re hungry for a way to live that feels authentic and true.
A good, but haunting piece, and one that touches me at a deeply personal level. I have often thought about how our mobility is impacting us, for good and for ill. I have seen the same thing happen to my hometown of Van Wert, OH, that the author describes happened to his hometown, although not to the extent that Wilson-Hartgrove describes. After World War II, my dad’s generation came home and settled there. His was a remarkable generation and Van Wert (and thousands of towns like it) thrived because the best and brightest chose to return home and not move on, at least initially. Then the children of those who had chosen to stay in their home towns moved away and those small little communities started to wither and the once strong sense of community became diminished.
Let me be clear about this. This is not a judgment on those from my generation (and after) who stayed where they were born and raised. It is an observation of what our increasingly mobile society has done to our communities.
I can remember as a college student sitting alone in my room and musing on the ironic fact that I couldn’t wait to get out of Van Wert only to realize a few years later that it was better to be part of everybody’s business in a close-knit community and my home neighborhood than to be in “the big city” all alone, and where almost nobody cared if I lived or died. I am convinced that the breakdown of our communities has had a terrible and deleterious effect on our society, at least from a community perspective, and like the author of this piece, I pray God grant us the grace of stability and the revitalization of our communities.
In the meantime, this is a void that the Church can help fill because we are called to worship God and be Christians together. How sad it is that many folks today don’t understand that and rob themselves of the very thing they desperately seek–a sense of real community who lives life together with God-given meaning and purpose. I don’t know what the new creation will look like, but I am convinced that it will have strong, vibrant, and stable communities to fulfill our deepest and best God-given desires to love and be loved.