Face the pain of community and be thankful

I live in a Christian community.

I have found Bonhoeffer’s Life Together very helpful but also very confronting.

This next excerpt puts a finger on what I think the biggest challenge of living in community is: being thankful when it feels like the people you are living alongside are causing pain.

Living in community is a really nice idea, until you realize it’s full of people who are incredibly weak, self interested and fallible. If you weren’t also all those things then you would have a very good reason to blame them for all the things that go wrong In a community. As it is the temptation is to blame them anyway and let those things cause damage to relationships. Bonhoeffer puts his case plainly: there is no excuse for this kind of approach to communal life.

We do not complain about what God does not give us; rather we are thankful for what God does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: other believers who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of God’s grace?

Is the gift of God any less immeasurably great than this on any given day, even on the most difficult and distressing days of a Christian community?

Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the common life, is not the one who sins still a person with whom I too stand under the word of Christ?

Will not another Christian’s sin be an occasion for me to ever anew give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ?

Therefore, will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me because it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only the Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ?

The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting.

Thankfulness works in the Christian community as it usually does in the Christian life. Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things as well. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts prepared for us because we do not give thanks for the daily gifts.