i’ve been reflecting on my various groups of friends ever since marie’s and my joint birthday party.

i’m a member of numerous communities. there’s my gathering – of course it’s a microcosm of my church, my house, my bike posse. there’s our weekly ultimate games with the folks from amgen, and of course i’m always welcomed by (most of) the folks from zoom soccer. i’ve got a strong community of close friends from my college years, most of them from intervarsity, and even older friends from over a decade ago – we bonded through the tuesday night gaming at the camas library and later through the ministry of peace/rulezero. there’s even a sense in which my workplace can be seen as a community.

of course in a larger sense i’m also a member of greater communities – my neighborhood, my city, my nation. the greater communities of nerds, the brotherhood of the saints, the family of all cyclists on the roads today. but for the most part these groups are abstractions, we aren’t affected by these larger entities in the same way we are directly challenged by the people we are in relationship with.

it’s been interesting recently to step back and really look at what it is that makes a community tick, and .83 has been a prime example. the group’s only been riding together for 9 months now and already we’ve had an amazing amount of bonding, fun, drama, and the full works. like any group it seems a defacto leadership has evolved, folks who invested early and often and were a part of the original vision for what having a riding posse could be like. still, this community is a tough one to be in because it is, in many ways, ruthless. people who don’t fit into it immediately are openly ostracized and eventually driven away. there is a strong sense of ‘us vs. them’ even though with a group of now forty or fifty cyclists, who are ‘we’? the only thing we have in common is that we bike, but there are some other commonalities. most of us drink beer. we’re almost exclusively white males and educated. it’s unlikely that this demographic will ever change, and even now there has been a minor backlash from the ‘leadership’ to differentiate the casual members from the more serious. different people respond to this idea in different ways but ultimately among the close group of friends at the core there will likely be little change.

i’ve been a member of a failed community such as this before. the rulezero gamers, aka the camas crew, is really the second iteration of a group of friends that bonded over common activities and developed, at least to my mind, deep relationships over the course of five years. in the end though these friendships were broken apart, some which i am certain will never be fixed, by a combination of our own selfishness and foolishness. it took me a full three months before i spoke with any of the people involved, and i was the least damaged by any of it. eventually we regrouped and some of the friendships have been rebuilt, but grudges do not die quickly amongst my friends. i wonder if .83 will traverse this arc? certainly a group of people, loosely bound who are all looking out for themselves is a veritable powderkeg.

in contrast, my gathering has been a community struggling with a reason to continue at times. unlike .83 i don’t think most of the group looks to biblestudy with such anticipation as to start a forum thread the day before the ride counting down the hours with representative pictures. in contrast to the rowdy racousness of a typical .83 forum fight or bike ride there’s too little passion. on the other hand there is genuine concern for each other and our failings, for what they are, are hopefully acknowledged and repented of.

of course questions still abound. what lessons can each group i am a member of learn from each other? how can i uniquely participate in each community as fully as i am able without stretching myself too thin and giving one group short shrift? where i am called to leadership how do i act with humility and where i am not how do i support those that are?

i spent this past weekend over at hat island, hanging out with some folks from my gathering and in general doing nothing. sitting on the deck looking at the water, getting a little burned and alot of time for thinking.

my mind has had alot to think about this week. between a wednesday of playing soccer and a thursday point83 ride that ended at golden gardens in the midst of a meteor shower are subtexts and dreams and a life that though it is my own i can’t comprehend it.

what does it mean to know a God who is at once so amazingly huge that he paints a million stars in the skies and sends us so much beauty but yet is so intimate to be concerned with the tiny details of our lives and relationships? how can that even be expressed?

Prayer by Thomas Merton

My Lord God
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean
that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that my desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire
in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear,
for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton (1915-1968), from Thoughts in Solitude