Community: Where to Begin

Approximately 742 miles separate Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Hudsonville, Michigan.

When we relocated to Michigan after eight years in South Dakota, traveling those miles was the easy part. What was harder was creating a new sense of community, a new sense of home with people we didn’t know yet.

We’d lived in Sioux Falls single, dating, and married. I’d moved there to attend a college that had “community” as a core value. The word “community” never held much sentimental significance for me—I saw it as a descriptor of where I happened to be at the current moment. I made friends easily and thought opportunities to do so were a given.

As a child and young adult, communities are constructed for you. You are born into the community of your friends and family. Later, you play and learn within the communities of your school, clubs, organizations, and athletic teams: groups of people with like-minded goals. It’s simple.

Until that move, building community was like running downhill, picking up speed without much effort.

Fast forward to Michigan, where we didn’t know anyone. Welcome to real adulthood, where there aren’t clubs, classrooms, kickoff day picnics, or other scenarios that construct community for you. I wasn’t sure where to start.

I attempted to say hello to people I saw in the same classes at the gym, but most people are on a sweat mission at the gym, not a friend-making mission. Pleasantries at church and at community events felt awkward and forced. Day-to-day neighborhood interactions were niceties rather than foundations for friendships because we didn’t have shared goals or experiences. Thank goodness for social media and technology, I’d say to myself, because they enabled me to maintain relationships with people back home.

However, I was changing in this new place. I was on a great adventure with my husband. We were seeing the world with new eyes and growing closer as we found home in each other. I found myself thinking about how a new frame of reference shook us up in a good way. We discovered a new place and a new season of our lives. Maybe I needed to shake up how I looked at the opportunities around me in order to establish a community of friends.

What if the shared goal I’d hoped to find was learning from the experiences of others? Since it pleases God when we live together in unity, certainly it would be a blessed assignment to approach my new life and potential new relationships with a positive attitude, a servant heart, and perseverance.

Creating community requires giving of yourself–if you ever hope to feel the tug of a connection. It’s like a fishing line; you’ve got to cast it out (often many times) to reel something in. You can sit safely on the dock or go for a leisurely boat ride without knowing the temperature of the water, its depth, or what lies beneath the surface, but you can be pretty certain you won’t have much of a fishing story to tell.

Maybe a better fishing analogy is that the lures in a tackle box are tools—but you can only use one at a time. Embracing someone else’s story and sharing my own means we are both better equipped to understand, to serve, to “spur one another on toward love and good deeds,” (Heb. 10: 24-25 NIV) and to create a community when we’re called upon to do so.

“Community” has become a term of texture, depth, and great significance for me. While I still want to surround myself with people like me, people whose stories are similar to my own, my communities today consist also of people who are in seasons I’ve left behind, am just now entering, or may never occupy. It’s good.

If you don’t see Lacey Rose Dixon taking photos or writing, she’s thinking about it. So far, she’s called Minnesota, South Dakota, and Michigan home, and her passport gets itchy for stamps. Lacey loves scuba diving with her hubby and crawling after her little man. Follow her @laceyrosedixon on Twitter.