“Honestly, I just love the community here.”
There it is—that word.
As a senior, I have lost count on how many times the word “community” or the belief surrounding the idea fell from someone’s lips on the stage in Hughes Auditorium or when prospective students walked across campus and questioned the ambassadors about what they enjoy about college life in Wilmore, Kentucky.
The first time I heard it was on Reasoner Green. It had already been a long day with moving into my first dorm after finding out my room had switched the night before. Then, taking a horrendous photo ID and trying not to be too talkative whenever another unfamiliar face introduced themselves to me drained the energy I thought I had.
Yet, I sat on the prickly green grass in a circle with about 14 other first-year students with our TAG 12 (shout out to Cheaper By the Dozen) leaders, Esther and Nehemiah. We asked Esther what she loved about Asbury, since we had been through too many awkward introductions and conversations and didn’t know what else to say.
“Honestly, I just love the community here.”
I didn’t believe her. It sounded like the Admissions Office gave the TAG leaders specific scripts to recite throughout Welcome Week— and yes, you read that correctly, underclassmen. It was a week of lectures, ropes courses and TAG bonding, not a simple weekend.
I remember wrestling with doubt. How could almost every upperclassman I spoke to give me the almost exact same answer?
When I visited Asbury as a junior in high school, I had heard the word, too, but honestly did not think much of it.
Did I know my major? No. Did I know anyone on campus? No. Did I want to go to Asbury? Yes, but I was so afraid of making the wrong decision I didn’t officially declare the university as my choice until the deadline of May 1, 2019.
So I ended up at a small university on Aug. 13, 2019, surrounded by a bunch of faculty, staff and older students throwing around a word I thought I understood at the time: community.
Why wouldn’t everyone stop talking about the community?
Because it’s important, they would say.
God would later reveal at a very inconvenient time: Because it is why I created you.
Before my junior year at Asbury, I sat in the passenger’s seat of a white Asbury van, frustration wafting off my person as I crossed my arms with a huff. Because through the side mirror, I could see four people— almost all of the other members of the ministry team I had been traveling with all summer.
They lifted stacks of equipment into the back part of the van, including speakers, a soundboard, a drum kit, microphones, etc. Conversation flowed easily on how to make everything fit; we were about to leave our final camp, and we had found a rhythm at this point.
But, the team refused to let me help.
I wish it were because I had been annoying them to death as a know-it-all, who everyone had to listen to because I was always right and never wrong.
Instead, I annoyed them as a stubborn, independent girl who hated letting people help her— after a bright red and white, deep chemical burn on my leg made walking feel like I was swimming in lava.
So, Seth locked me in the van.
“You’re going to hurt yourself more,” I remember him telling me. “Don’t worry. We got this.”
I fought with him. “No, I can do it!”
I was the IT person on the crew. Loading the van was part of my job description. I could do it myself.
“But you don’t need to,” Seth replied. “Let us help.” As he walked away toward Harper, Zeke, and John, he called out over his shoulder, “We are a team, after all.”
A team. A synonym for community, my brain thought.
Through my ministry classes, Dr. Brian Hull always uses this phrase: We were made for community by community. I can’t remember if he came up with it himself, but I never forgot it— I just didn’t understand it.
Not until that moment in the van.
God Himself is a community. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, unite from three distinct persons as one God existing through “a community of self-giving and loving relationships with each other” as author Jacqueline Mann writes.
Then, God created humanity. He created Eve because He recognized Adam needed a companion. As image-bearers of a communal God, the need to have a community has been engraved into our DNA almost since the beginning of time.
We are not meant to be alone. So, why, when we start walking with God do we believe the opposite?
Especially on this campus, faculty and students alike tend to carry more weight on our shoulders than we can handle and refuse to ask for assistance— especially when we’re physically unable with chemical burns scarring our legs, right? We don’t want to look weak. We don’t want to fail.
However, when we try to do this life alone, we are failing. A lonely life is not what God intended for us.
As a senior, I regret that I went so long without realizing this simple but life-altering truth. Our days are numbered here, and we will never be in this space with these people at this time again. And our God is One who puts the people, the friends, the team and the community we need around us.
We just have to be brave enough not only to see it, but to accept it.
