Don’t face life’s difficulties alone in 2011

This is a good time to take stock of the past and look ahead to the future. As you consider how you would like the New Year to unfold, I invite you to look at the people you surround yourself with and the communities with which you associate. Your community is a critical part of your life and helps to determine your happiness. 

Did your community stand with you in the last year, as difficulties unfolded?  If so, you are blessed! Did you have people to whom you could turn, in both good times and bad? Hooray! Or did you find yourself alone as you faced the uncertainties and difficulties of life?  We all need communities of people who love and care about us. Consider this story, “The Bear and the Two Travelers,” which was told by Aesop sometime around 600 B.C.:

Two men were traveling together, when a bear suddenly met them on their path. One of them climbed up quickly into a tree and concealed himself in the branches.

The other, seeing that he would be attacked, fell flat on the ground, and when the bear came up and felt him with his snout, and smelt him all over, he held his breath, and feigned the appearance of death as much as he could.

The bear soon left him, for it is said he will not touch a dead body. When he was quite gone, the other traveler descended from the tree, and jocularly inquired of his friend what it was the bear had whispered in his ear.

“He gave me this advice,” his companion replied. “Never travel with a friend who deserts you at the approach of danger.”

Did you have any danger approach you in the past year? Maybe you lost a job or had the threat of a lost job. Maybe you had an illness in your family. Maybe you went through a rocky period in your marriage.  

If you saw danger last year, then you know the importance of your traveling companions. You know how critical it is to have people who you love and who love you that you can count on in hard times. And you also know what it is like to be alone in the world, left to fight the bears alone while people you thought were your friends scurry out of harm’s way.

As you start the New Year, my suggestion to you is that you find a community that will stand with you, even in the hard times. This community might be as simple as your family, or it might be much larger.  As the pastor of the Journey Church, I think this community is best found in a church, and I invite you to find a church in this New Year. Churches have been walking with people– and not running away when the bears come– for generations and generations.

I am new to Maricopa (we moved to town in May). My family all lives out of state. My “people” are scattered to the wind and my wife and children are my only family nearby. When the bears of life come, I need more than just my immediate family can provide; my church provides that larger community. 

And the church does not disappoint. My church does not run up the tree, leaving me to play dead when the bear comes.  As the Journey Church, we do our best to walk with (not run away from) the people with whom we come into contact.

This is what churches do because this is what our Lord Jesus commands us to do.  Jesus commanded his disciples to “love one another, just as I have loved you.”  Church is that community that loves one another and that makes sure no one is lying on the path alone to be eaten by the bears of life. 

There are plenty of bears out there. I have no doubt that you will encounter one this year. Let us make our whole community, the city of Maricopa, a place where neighbors stand together in the face of the bears. I also invite you to find a more intimate community – such as a church – that will not abandon you when the bears come.

Eric Brown is the pastor of Journey Church, which meets on Sundays at 10:15 a.m. at Santa Cruz Elementary School in Tortosa: JourneyUnitedMethodist.org.

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