Longing for More (Part 1 of 2)

Last June, 2012, we moved from our apartment in Antioch to a home in East Nashville.  We have always loved East Nashville, but I loath moving.  Our agreement to move centered around Eric working in East Nashville and the commute, though only 12 miles, took a good 45 minutes in each direction.

In the weeks preceding our move, we began to question our lives.  We wrested with deep questions about what we were doing (vocationally and as a family) and why we were doing it.  Our daughter was 6 months old, I longed to be home with her, and we were moving to a new part of town.  A community we loved to visit, but a place where we knew no one.

Nashville has over half a million people, and it's totally normal to commute to work.  People don't blink an eye at driving nearly an hour to get to church, or a friend's house to share a meal.  And we were part of the masses doing the same thing.  Except we weren't happy.  At the core of our beings we longed for deeper relationships.  We wanted neighbors.  I've come to word this time in our lives as, "we longed to live, work, worship in ONE place."

Our move seemed to fill that longing, on the surface.  In the next few months I would stop working full-time to raise our daughter, Eric was (is) employed by a church in East Nashville, and I joined a local MOMS club.  (A blog for another day - joining the MOMS Club is, hands down, the best thing I've ever done).  Eric's commute is 5 minutes, through a park and a neighborhood.

But God had begun to stir in our hearts.  We weren't settled.  No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't foster the type of relationships we dreamed about.  So we started seriously considering intentional Chrisitian community.  What do they look like?  Where are they?  How can we be part of something like this?  Eric was reading book after book, we talked with friends who are currently living in different intentional Christian communities.  We slowly started to share this longing with our families and our closest friends.

And then we visited one.  We researched and emailed and talked with communities we were interested in.  In January, we visited Koinonia Farms, an intentional Christian community and active farm in Americus, Georgia.  We participated in their way of life for a few days and it was wonderful.

Right around this same time, we got our first call from Hawaii.  I immediately said NO, thought the idea of moving to the middle of the Pacific Ocean was absurd, and continued to talk with other communities.  We started dreaming about spending our summer (2013) learning from an established community.  In a perfect world, we needed to learn how to farm on a small scale, to do our part in living a more sustainable life, so we only talked with communities who could provide both.

I was most interested in a community that had a 9 month "internship" because I knew it would ground us for a while longer.  We had the potential to fall in love with the community and stay.  Eric was most interested in a community (Koinonia) that blended sustainable agriculture, peacemaking, and community.  Eric saw Koinonia's 3 month internship as an opportunity - a training grounds - for our (potential) work in Hawaii.

We had agreed to talk about Hawaii again in 1 month (with the Pastor and his wife).  We talked and I shared my concerns along with a handful of questions.  It was no secret that I didn't want to go.  The pastor and his wife are dear friends of ours, and during that call she said, "Joy, if you don't want to come, we don't want you here."

To be continued...