30 days of Thankfulness: day 6

Today I've been thinking a lot about community. The past couple of years have been very up and down for me in terms of loneliness and longing for community. I think one of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a new wife was that Matt is the most important and constant community I'll ever have. Over the past 2 years, I've learned to be content in the fact that I have God and I have Matt, no matter where we live. No matter how far away from my closest girl friends we are. It seems like as soon as I learned that, The Lord lead us right back to where I had always wanted to go in the first place! Now I am SO content in knowing that I have Matt with me as my most faithful friend and companion, and the fact that we are living so close to woman who I adore is the icing on the cake! At the moment, we are living in the bottom level of our friends Josh and Tyana's bi level house. Community living is such a blessing when the people you live with are intentional about being in community with you. I guess that's the key, though, right?! Josh and Ty have been a great blessing to us. They've been married a lot longer than us, and they've been through already what we're dealing with now. It feels good to have them around all the time. They hold us accountable, but in a very healthy and loving way. I've already learned a lot about what a "family discussion" looks like from them. Before we moved in, every time we were going to talk to them about the next 6 months and what it would look like, I would seriously get knots the size of New York in my stomach. And before we had our first "family meeting", I had the same thing. Not because of them, but because I've always just had kind of a negative experience with family discussions, and since that's how I saw it, I was expecting them to make me feel like I'm a failure at life. But really they just love us. And that's the most important thing in community. That you LOVE each other. I'm reading the book Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist. *side note* Shauna is one of my very favorite writers. When I read her work, I feel like I could go to her house and hang out with her and she wouldn't think I was awkward or weird or psychotic for showing up at her house. I feel like we're friends. That's why I'm smitten with her work.*end side note : )* she talks about community in the book, and everything she says just hits home with me. Community is so important. And community with the RIGHT PEOPLE is even more important. I'm so beyond words thankful to be here right now, in the community that I love, with people who build into us and let us build into them. I am so happy I could burst. I could go on and on and on about how thankful I am for this, but I think you get the picture : )

P.S. If you'd like to check out Shauna Niequist's book, Bittersweet, you should also check out her other one, Cold Tangerines. They are both at the top of my list. So, SO good.