DISCOVER WHAT IS PREVENTING YOU FROM AUTHENTIC COMMUNITY

DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes. Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. It’s Dawn again, and I want to welcome any new listeners today. We are just a handful of episodes in, and I’ve been talking about the pillars of my podcast, my passions, my why’s, my reasons for doing Faith Fringes. And today I wanted to focus on authentic community. Have you ever had a group of people who you know will be there for you no matter what or someone that you can completely be yourself with and feel accepted no matter what you say, what you do? Or maybe you can think of a time in your life when you’ve went through a rough spot and someone journeyed alongside you and it made all the difference. So that’s what we’re going to jump into today; is what does community look like? What does it really mean? Even look at when are times when we’ve been in a relational desert and what prevents us from being in authentic community.

So today we’re going to kind of talk through all that and you’ll hear some stories and just know that this is a place that we are going to hear a lot of stories about community. And I want this to be a safe place to talk about what is preventing us and how we can make our community better. And I mean that in many different ways. So for example, we can have community in places we work, we can have community in our neighborhood. We can have women’s groups or men’s groups or even school community, but I really want to dive in and see, do you really feel accepted and feel like you can be yourself in those types of communities? I grew up and moved a ton through my elementary and high school years. And then even after college, I moved around a lot.

So I was always kind of like an observer of what does it mean to jump in to a group that’s already developed or how do I start a new group? So I was always kind of like watching and learning how to really become friends with people. And I think one of my things is I’ve been able to jump in really fast and network, and it’s probably one of my strengths of networking and connecting people. But yet I noticed that although I could go deep and people would think I was deep, there was still a part of me that was holding back. And I think some of that is because I moved so much. I think I remember I counted, I moved 20 times in 15 years in my life and realized, “Wow, I am good at making friends, but do people really know the true Dawn?” I started really realizing that when I was probably in my twenties and I had, I was actually working at a college and I had made some good friends and we would meet together. I think it was, I don’t even know what night it was, but we meet once a week and we were going through a book.

It was actually one of my, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a Larry Crabb book called finding God. And that book really got me into learning what community really was. And this group, it was, I think there is like six to 10 of us and sometimes six people would come sometimes eight, but we just were really talking through the book and learning more about God, but not only that, but we were there for each other. We would eat dinners together, we would be there when people were going through hard times, we’d help each other move. We were just living life together and that was really my first taste of what it really meant to truly be immersed in a true community where you’re living life together. And we would share tons of experiences. It was one of the most powerful groups I’ve ever been in. After that, I went on and have been in more groups like through colleges or churches, where you have a start and end time where you’re doing like a book study or a Bible study or something like that.

Those are great also but for me, the ones that have been most important are the ones that have been super intentional and really clear on we want to do life together. In fact I actually moved out to Colorado back in 2005. I moved out here with about 15 other people and we were actually going to start a house church. And that was our goal is to live life with everyone. And we moved out here and we all lived within, I would say 10 blocks of each other in downtown Denver and it was super fun. That is a long story that I won’t get into on here, but it ended up not working out and after a year I kind of moved and it was kind of a disaster, but the thought of living in community and moving with about 15 people with the same heart for community and living together was so powerful. I mean, I moved from Indiana to Colorado, moved across the country to do this, and that’s how much I believed in it. And so, but like you heard me say, there are times where it works out in times that it doesn’t, and that you have to take a risk and you have to jump in and try it.

So I want to look at what keeps us from trying to jump into community. There are some things that keep us from it. And I would say the things I’ve noticed that keep us from getting into it is, like I just said a bad experience or fear, fear of rejection, fear of judgment, fear of, “They’re not going to really like me if they know who I really am.” And we kind of get stuck in the shame and the hiding and we hide because we’re either comparing ourselves to one another, or we have a lot of negative beliefs about ourselves or about other people. There are some beliefs of I’m not good enough, or I have to be perfect or also beliefs of, the past hurts too much. The past gets in the way of, “These people haven’t been enough for me. They haven’t been there for me or they hurt me or it was too much drama.” And so looking at our past is important as well as what are our beliefs about ourselves.

Another thing is we’re acting out of pain. We’re basically saying there’s too much pain in community. It’s better if I’m by myself, but what happens is we usually build walls around that pain and then we’re sad because we’re isolated. So a lot of it is really getting real with yourself saying, is community worth it? Is it scary? Yes, but is it worth it? And what do I want from it? So let’s look at some definitions of what I mean. When I say community, what exactly does that mean? And I want to, I’m going to be quoting two people that are my biggest mentors with community, and they don’t know it because I’ve only met one of them in person, but I’ve read a lot of their books. I’ve studied from them. And one is Larry Crabb and the other is Bernay Brown.

I’m sure you guys have heard of all of them, both of them or maybe just one, but Larry Crabb actually has been one of my spiritual, like theological mentors or spiritual fathers, I would say. And as I’m recording this just last month, I found out that Larry Crabb has passed away and it was so powerful to me. I had actually just attended his school for spiritual direction in October of 2020. And it was actually, we didn’t know it at the time, but it was actually his last class for that before he passed. And I’m just so grateful I actually got to meet him because he has, some of the books he has written has been some of my major foundational spiritual theology and meeting him was just one of my like hero dreams come true.

I actually got to eat breakfast with him and talk with him one-on-one and then I got to know him on a personal level during that October school. I was just so happy. Anyway, I am going to be talking from one of his books and it actually is the book, they changed the name. When I read it before, I think it was called The Safest Place on Earth. I think now it’s called Spiritual Community, but either way, if you want to look up that book, it’s great. And he’s talking about spiritual community and this is what he says, “The difference between spiritual and unspiritual community is not whether conflict exists, but it is rather in our attitude toward it and our approach to handling it. When conflict is seen as an opportunity to draw more fully on spiritual resources, we have the makings of a spiritual community. We often settle for an unspiritual community of congenial relationships, cooperative relationships, and consoling relationships and these are all counterfeits of spiritual friendship.”

So let’s look at that for a minute. Basically, what he’s saying is a lot of times we get into these groups, community groups to make us feel good, to make sure everyone’s cooperative and consoling. And reality is I think, I am thinking of times in my life when it’s been so powerful, when a good friend who I love and trust has come to me and said, “Hey, something’s not right. We need to talk.” And we talk through it and we grow from the hard conversation. I want friends in my life who can confront me in a caring, loving way, who know me, who know my heart, who believe in me. And that’s what I believe is spiritual community, where you are willing to make each other better. And as Larry Crabb talks about in his book, he’s talking about more, not only that, but we have to lean on who God says we are and who He is saying we are and our safety is in Him so that we can handle some of the trauma that goes on in life and some of the hardships that come with with other people being that close in our life. And that we have to depend on Him.

So I think some other definitions that are important to talk about is what is connection? And this I’m going to draw from Bernay Brown who is an amazing author of many bestsellers. And she defines connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued, when they can give and receive without judgment, and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship. That is such a powerful definition of connection. And I want you to think, like, who do I really connect with? Who do I feel seen with, who do I feel heard and valued? I know there was a time in my life, I feel like after I left the group that I moved out to Denver with, I felt like there was, I was in a desert of a community because I was really unsure of what it looked like in my life.

I didn’t really have people I could be super vulnerable with or trust and feel broken with and real. So I went through a time of a desert and some of it was because some of my best friends moved and it was really hard, but I definitely missed it and could feel the difference in my life without having that. And so I had to actually look for community and in the middle of that, I actually also had became pregnant with my first child, our first child. I was older when I started having kids. I was in my late thirties, closer to 40 actually and all I had known was doing life, my husband and I joke about this now. We’re like, “We had so much freedom. We had no clue until we had kids.” Like, do you want to go on a bike ride or a hike? Yes and within 10 minutes, we were out the door. Now for any of you listening who have kids, you know how it is. It takes like an hour to get ready to do anything. Whether it’s go to school or a bike ride, you have to like pack 50 million things.

So right as I was starting to have kids, I realized like I needed moms in my life who knew what it was like to be a mom. And I just never realized the need I had for that type of community. When you become a mom, you need other mom friends. And I just remember I actually joined a group called MOPs. I don’t know if any of you have heard of that, but it stands for mothers of preschoolers and it’s usually a group of moms that join together, like twice a month and they meet, I think your kids have to be five or under, so before school age. And it’s just such an important time to connect with other people who are in the same stage of life. And I had just never experienced that. I remember the first MOPs group I joined, I was pregnant when I joined, and I remember after I had my baby, I was so nervous to go back. I didn’t even know how to use the car seat. I remember looking at some of the other moms and like, “How are they putting the blanket over the car seat so the baby can sleep while we’re during the meeting? I don’t even know how to do that.”

I had so many questions and I was so nervous that people were going to be judging me because it was the first time I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. Didn’t have control in a big way. Like being a parent makes that come out and all of us, like the, like I was pretty, I felt like I was pretty successful and you know, when you’re running your own life and then I had went on to schooling and had gotten my master’s degree and then finally in my late thirties, I have a baby and everything changes. I was lost and filled with anxiety. And so when I went to this MOPs group, there were two or three specifically that I felt were so real. These moms were so real. I remember some of them just like holding my hand, saying, “You’ve got this.” Just so encouraging and for me to be so real with them and just feeling accepted and feeling normalized that some of the stuff I was going through, I wasn’t crazy.

And I remember that being another time where community has been so important, for someone to see me, to acknowledge me and not judge. And so I think as we’re looking at community, we need to also look at, like I said, some of the things that keep us, I mentioned shame, fear and false beliefs of I’m not good enough. Another thing I want to kind of look at is vulnerability. What does that mean? A lot of times vulnerability is, it feels like, well, it feels like you’re going to go into a situation completely naked. If you were to walk into a room completely naked, you’d be embarrassed, there’d be so much physically going on too, like scared, anxious. And so a lot of times vulnerability feels like that and so what we do is we hide it. We think, “If I’m vulnerable, that feels weak. So I can’t do it,” when in actuality being met with empathy in a vulnerable place, actually frees you from that feeling. It’s actually the opposite.

So a lot of times we have to go against our feeling. So vulnerability is like the quality or state of being exposed with the possibility of being attacked or harmed either physically or emotionally. That’s the definition of vulnerability. And this is probably from Bernay Brown. So vulnerability feels like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t do this.” But it’s true, when shame and vulnerability get into the light, when they get into connection actually reduces. And the opposite is true. Vulnerability actually attracts people to us. So when we’re looking at community, we have to be vulnerable. And sometimes that means going first. That means going first and saying, “Hey, I need some deeper friends here.”

In fact, I was coming off of another spiritual community desert in my life and I realized I need community. So I remember, I actually prayed about it and I said, “Okay, God, I need some women in my life that we can talk about things. We can talk about spiritual things that are important to me.” And I’d started praying. And it was like a year and I would, I asked God to show me women who I could trust and I could really be vulnerable with. And I remember talking to one of the women. She was actually from my mom’s group and we, our kids were playing on the playground and we were talking about a book study that we were going to go to and then we’re like, “We just don’t want to waste time.”

We were both working moms and we said, “If we’re going to give up a night away from our family to talk about stuff, we don’t want it to be like fluff. We want it to be real and meaningful.” And so that’s when we said, “Hey, let’s start a meaningful time where we really talk about spirituality and we talk about what that means and we start to get to know each other on a deeper level.” And so she and I started looking for people and it took about, like I said, a year and finally we invited, we have five women and we’ve been meeting for about two or three years now. It’s been hard with COVID, I must admit to do it on Zoom, whereas we used to meeting in person, but just really sharing and talking. We had to be really intentional and there are times where we’d get away from it and then we had to bring it back to intentional meeting and sharing from a deep place. And we’ve had to talk about like, what’s getting in our way?

And so some of the things I’d like to help, like what do we do about it? What do we do about our fears of not being a community? First, you kind of have to acknowledge your own story and your own pain. You kind of have to own that and say, “This is who I am, but I get to write the ending. I might not have been able to write everything up until now, but now I get to write the ending and so I’m going to acknowledge my own story and pain.”

The second, you have to be intentional in creating space to process and feel things, whether it’s journaling or talking to someone or being, so create space to process and feel your own story. And then I also think you need to ground yourself in a deeper thing than your circumstances. Of course, because my podcast is about spirituality, I highly recommend exploring your faith more and exploring like, “What do I really believe God is saying when I am the beloved or I’m accepted in spite of my humanness, in spite of my brokenness?” And I know a lot of times religion brings shame and to-do list and perfectionism, and that’s not really what God is about. He is about love and compassion and acceptance where you’re at. We are not perfect. We can’t be. We’re human.

And also knowing that when you do get in community, it can get messy. And so when you are grounded more in your faith, you can realize when others disappoint you and it’s messy, you can lean back on God because people are going to hurt you. I mean, some not on purpose, some on purpose, but I mean, I think of marriage. Marriage is one of the hardest relationships. Talk about a community of two. Like it’s one of the hardest relationships and if people aren’t saying it’s hard, I wouldn’t believe them. I mean, where else are you going to, someone sees the good, the bad, the ugly? It’s usually marriage. And so knowing that my husband is not going to be perfect for me, and I’m not going to be perfect for him. And when we disappoint each other, when we are grounded in something deeper than our marriage and deeper than ourselves, and we’re grounded in our faith that is super helpful to coming out of some of our conflicts or to journeying alongside that with one another.

And finally, what else do we do about it besides acknowledging your own pain, creating space to process and feel that grounding yourself in your faith? We need to offer that space to others. We need to offer like very real ways to connect with others and give them that space where there’s not judgment. For example, like don’t over spiritualize things. A lot of times people, when they don’t know what to do with hard times or pain, a lot of times they might quote a Bible verse. And that just, it isn’t helpful when we’re doing it to like get away from the pain and hoping that it just covers it up. I mean, it might be helpful after a few conversations and we’re really connecting in this verse comes up and it really is impactful. That’s different. I’m talking about just quoting things like, “Well, God, doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

Like that’s one I hate the most, because really, He does. He does give us more than we can handle so that we lean on Him. And so I really think not over spiritualizing when you’re journeying alongside people is super important. Another thing, actually, one of my best friends said this, her name is Shannon Ranks, she said this during one of her, she was speaking and she was speaking on pain and faith. And she said, “Faith is not meant to do away with pain. Faith is meant to sit with pain.” And I just, that’s one of my favorite quotes ever, because it’s really talking about yes, sometimes people, when they over spiritualize, they’re trying to like cover up or move away from pain and really faith isn’t, doesn’t just sit with pain. And I really do believe that. You don’t have to change or fix people, but just journey alongside them.

So think of a time when you were going through something hard and can anyone really say anything to get you out of that? What did that, did somebody say something that really like snapped you out of it? Or was it someone who was just sitting with you and being there no matter what, without judgment, without the perfect words? Which one was more impactful to you? That’s what I’m talking about; is when you are sitting with someone, don’t worry about fixing or changing them, but just be. And on a deep level, like we, this is where we can see God’s goodness and His love and His faithfulness is in community. I feel that He has made us to need each other as part of a bigger picture, a larger story of how we need Him. And He gives us one another, a picture like the Trinity. If you believe in that, the Trinity is very relational. God the father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit, they were in unity, this dance together of one.

And that is an example of how we are made in his image. And so how we can be in community with one another, that’s how we were created. And so through the pain, through the doubt, through the struggle, we can be together and journey and that I believe is what God has designed us to be. And so, as we think through this authentic community where some, again, just rephrasing some things that are super important, vulnerability, trust, connection, and real connection versus social media connection is what I’m talking about. We want real connection, not social media, like all the highlight reels of, “Oh, I’m connecting on how cute our kids are and what all my accomplishments are and like the perfect highlight reel.” No, no, no, real connection where people, you can see each other and allow the brokenness and the realness to be there.

And when you do see that, you’re holding space for one another here. You’re not over, spiritualizing it, you’re not fixing people, you’re just being there. And so as we go on in my podcast, I am going to love bringing guests on here to talk about hard things, to offer space, to talk about things like race, like LGTBQ community, like anything that like the deconstruction of our faith. I know that’s a big topic or hurt by the church. Like we need to talk about all these things and I hope that this podcast can help you figure out your community. I hope we can be a part of that community together. I think it’s so needed right now and I believe that’s how we were created.

And so just to end, as we’re ending, I want to give you some experiential things, like, as you do want to meet with people, and you’re kind of wondering like, “Okay, how do I start this? How do I start like meeting with a group of people that I can really be real with?” Some things to start. Like I would, first of all, look up the Bernay Brown video on empathy. Just type it into YouTube. Bernay Brown video on empathy. That will be a huge one. I love that one. Another thing to say is to really just say, “I want a place where we can be real and not be fake and I don’t want drama.” So some of the things you can say is, “I’ve been struggling with this or the things I wish my friends knew about me is this,” and kind of just start there and see what happens.

And ask other people. Maybe somebody come to your mind as I’m talking of, “I bet this person will be safe. I’m going to ask that person to go to lunch or go to coffee or pick up the phone and have a conversation about taking this deeper.” I joked when I was trying to get my women’s group together. I felt like it was like dating, right? Like you’re like asking someone out. It’s like, “Do you want to take this to the next level?” It’s like a defining the relationship talk. But it’s okay. You have to do it, like reach out to your friends that maybe you have at acquaintance level, but you feel like they’re trustworthy and ask them, “Hey, do you want to do a deeper type of meeting, intentional space?”

So I hope today as you’ve been listening that you’ve really been able to like think through your own community, whether you’ve had community desert or whether you’ve or you have a community now, and you want to make it a little deeper. I hope you’ve gotten some ideas. I hope you have some hope there and I’d love to hear from you. If you want to send me an email and tell me more of your thoughts or ask more questions, email me at dawn@faithfringes.com. I love hearing what you’re learning and what you’d want to hear next. Thank you so much for listening today. Don’t miss an episode, make sure you rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to Faith Fringes. Thanks. I’ll talk to you.

Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up. Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

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