“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together It is almost nine and mostly dark by the time we get back down to village. It’s our second night staying in a house on the cliff 450 steps above Vernazza,…
Tag: Travel
Proximity
“There’s something weird about playing games in the wake of terrible tragedies, but really, games are always played in proximity to tragedy.” John Green Friday morning, while I read about the new adaptation of Jane Eyre, my iPad clinks to life with a pop-up news alert. These are the alerts that usually wake me up in…
Hillside United
…So take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless—cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so…
Where They’re From
It is approximately the third question we ask each other. Unless we’ve found something interesting in the answers to “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” we move on to “Where are you from?” It’s the most universal of the first-conversation questions. After a while you just can’t tell if someone should be in…
The Western Front
“Comrade, I did not want to kill you…. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades,…
Leaving Home, Taking Home
For me, the lesson of young adulthood has been how to appreciate the beauty of investing in the community around me. Not used to long-term residence or relationships, I’ve been learning to trust God in the indefinite termlessness of young adulthood. What does it mean, I used to ask, to stay somewhere and to love it?
The Way Home 