Sophia Carolina: What do you want? ...

Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Hmm, if that's true, which of course it is. Then why do I want what I think I need? Maybe I don't really "need" the things I want. Maybe if I saw it as; "I won't lack the important things God knows I really need" and the other stuff is just my human thoughts mucking things up.

Let me give you a little perspective on where I'm at with all this. Right now we're living here in San Diego as part of an intentional community. Oh geez! Stop rolling your eyes, it's not what you think. It's not a commune. We're actually part of a mentoring/coaching community that we are helping to lead, but that's even harder to explain, so for the sake of getting this blog post out of my head and put into words, I'm just going to go with "intentional community".

Last week, as a part of a book we are reading together, we were asked to list the words that came to mind when we hear the word "community". I must admit I struggled a bit with being honest. The first words that wanted to fly out of my mouth were bad hairdos and weird clothing (but that's just too much TV coverage of the wackos that had 400 kids taken away in a raid on their ranch), but what I ended up saying out loud was "challenging". A few years back, I would have ran away as fast as I could at the thought of living in a "community"; when I was in high school one of my sisters went off to live in a Kibbutz (that did not end well) and I had many pre-conceived ideas of what living in community might look like. So far, this experience is not stereotypical.

And now that it's been almost a year into the adventure, I am starting to see my role here a little more clearly and my definition of "community" is changing. One of the things I've struggled the most this past year is with giving myself away and keeping my love tank full. I saw a great quote recently, it went something like this:

"In order to receive love and acceptance, you only need to give it away."

Think about that for a moment. Isn't that so opposite to how our culture stockpiles away everything for ourselves? That's what I've been doing emotionally and relationally. I've had to dig deep to get to the heart of this one. I suppose it's a good thing to realize something isn't right.

The truth is that I need to be needed and wanted, but really, unless I need and want others I'm not going to get what I want. I'm still thinking this one through and as a part of that conversation with myself I'm going to re-read a great book that I went through about 10 years ago, called "Search for Significance", maybe it will help me remember who I am and why I want the things that I do.

So in celebration of my "aha" moment today, I share with you this fabulous vintage Cheap Trick song that I so can relate to today. Enjoy!