An accidental adventure...
A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time outside of the Kansas Museum of History. I was meeting a client there, so naturally I showed up far too early to do an unnecessary amount of exposure checks. I walked around the schoolhouse, setting up, tearing down, and re-setting up my backdrop and props. After awhile of doing this, and feeling satisfied with my setup, I began to divert my attention elsewhere. I sat on the steps of the schoolhouse and immersed myself in the scene around me. I felt the breeze on my face, and watched as it rustled the tall grasses. I watched the birds dip and dive and listened to their songs in the distance. Eventually, a honey bee came near to the clovers by which I was sitting. I whipped out my camera and started snapping away as it buzzed about busily, collecting nectar from one clover, and then the next, and then the next... I had left my near-dying phone on the charger in my vehicle after arriving earlier that day, but at some point while photographing the bee, I realized that the sun had shifted suspiciously low in the sky. I walked to the car to take a look at my phone, only to realize that it was, in fact, completely dead. After starting the vehicle and charging the phone just enough to turn it on, I was shocked to find that I had spent nearly two hours at this location, most of which was spent photographing bees and not my clients. She had texted asking to reschedule, but because my phone was dead, I never got the message. After a quick text to my client and a mildly frantic phone call to my husband to tell him that I had not been kidnapped or murdered, and that it was only my scattered brain cells and lack of internal clock that were the perpetrators, I reflected on my time spent at the museum, sitting in the grass and musing over nature. The honey bee that flew to and fro, that was by itself in the moment but not truly alone...
I'm kind of a loner...
I grew up as an only child and a military brat. Over the course of my formative years, I went to 11 schools and graduated from a class of 300+ students who's names I didn't know. My experiences in childhood have greatly shaped the way that I make connections with others as an adult. I have an amazing, loving family that includes a wonderful husband, three beautiful children, and a handful of people who I'm blessed to call friends. But the reality is that I consistently find myself in a mental space of isolation. I find myself struggling with cognitive dissonance as I pine for community, yet on the other hand consistently choose to keep all burdens strapped tightly to my own shoulders. God's convicted me recently of this hypocrisy. How can community blossom in my life when I keep all of my walls up, martyring myself to bear burdens that no person was meant to bear alone? Our Creator designed us to maintain a perfect, symbiotic relationship with Him, the earth, and one another. Community is written into the DNA of all social creatures and the nature around us. We see the same pattern throughout much of creation; helping one another bear each other's burdens for the purpose of bettering all.
And that was the sweet and buzzing reminder from the honey bee that day: Community. As humans, our definition of what community means is, obviously, quite different from other species. Our needs as people are not only rooted in the physical world, met by the processes of biology. Ours are rooted in something deeper and can only be met by the transcendental experiences of this life; by loving one another, by bearing one another's burdens, and through communion with the Father and the earth He has created for us.
"Carry one another's burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ."
-Galations 6:2-
"Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up."
-Ecclesiates 4:9-10-
