Tribe Life Tuesday: Community & Honor

A weekly post from my childhood to grown-up friend Carrie ~ 

sharing her awesome life and her desire to have community while doing it!

Community is as rewarding as it is messy and, believe me, it can get messy. To be in community with someone looks like making room for them, all of them, the really great parts and the less great parts.

For example: I remember a period of time when I purposely disconnected from community because I believed my view on a matter was the right one. I saw no fault in me and lots of faulty thinking in the other party. Confrontation would turn into arguments without any resolution and that is never the point of confrontation.

Several years after my disconnection and reconnection to community, I was reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Danny Silk, in which he states, “the goal of confrontation is to restore connection.”

That was like a sonic boom in my mind. Why didn’t I know that or see that?? Of course that’s the point! I have been doing this wrong the whole time… 

You see, my goal of confrontation was to get you to see my point. More importantly, I wanted you to change your mind and embrace my way of thinking. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. I was young and dumb and that was my truth but all it did was isolate me and remove me from a healthy relationship.

When we isolate ourselves we put limits on our life. We limit our capacity to be in healthy, authentic, self-less relationships.

Community is where you get to fully be you and I get to fully be me. Here we lay down our weapon called control. When we do that, we create safe places for one another to grow and be loved unconditionally in a judgement and competition free zone. This is what authentic community looks like. It’s face to face, it’s joy and sorrow, it’s hope and pain, it’s success and failure and we share it all together. Once we allow ourselves to be in such a community, honor is a natural outflow.

“The principle of honor states – that accurately acknowledging who people are will position us to give them what they deserve and to receive the gift they are in our lives. Honor creates life giving relationships.” – Kris Vallotton 

Honor is seeing people for who they are not what they’ve done, or what they can do for you. It’s being able to look at them through a lens of kindness, forgiveness, mercy, honesty, and love. Honor is invaluable; it’s an unmatched currency and can only be given by those who have fought for it.

Let’s choose to fight for honor within our communities today. Though life may be messier when done in community, there really is no better way to live.

Carrie