Connection

I have said, ever since reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, that my call in life is to shorten the degrees of separation between people. Mavens, connectors, whatever... Some of us are built to be in relationships that foster connection and more relationship. 

We are as humans so interwoven, and whether we care to admit it or not, we need one another. Thinking through this newfound lens of recognizing my own violence, by contrast (mostly...I confess to one egregious act of violence that I am still figuring out how to repair) today was a day of connecting and nurturing and adding value by plugging one relationship into another.

One of the unique marks of my United Methodist denomination is our connection. No one stands alone. And that requires a willingness to name our needs and our gifts, to be willing to share burden and blessing, sometimes in the same moment. It isn't always way to engage or involve another new have so much more control when we just rely on our own gifts and graces. It requires us to enter into holy dialogues when we don't see eye to eye, to find a third way when an impasse seems inevitable. And it is hard. And we don't do it very well most of the time.

Abraham's descendants outnumber the stars and we are, all of us, created from common cloth.

Isn't that amazing?

God, help me share my needs and my gifts; remind me that I am just one part of the whole...one very small and yet vital part.