Authentic Community

I have the last email that I received from my boss at the last church where I served, I even framed it. In it he warned me about things that would plague those of us who had committed to live at least part of our lives in ministry. One of those was, and I quote "the over and over again illusion of genuine friendship."

He was right. I was reminded of this during this vacation while working on this blog. Any of you who maintain a blog probably know that statistics about your readership are readily available. When I worked in ministry and before my boss got sick and everything went to Hell in a hand basket the readership for our vacation blog was quite different. Those who daily followed our vacations in those days numbered more than 250 people while today it is more like 30.

First let me remind anyone who reads this that the purpose of this blog is to 1) Provide our girls a scrapbook of sorts to remind them of some of the times that we have had over the years and 2) to help our friends and family to participate in the fun. So, don't think that readership is the goal for this blog at this point and you should also know that we have never promoted the blog except to those whom Megan and I have worked with; but I couldn't help but notice the difference and the change in life.  I would have thought that all of those readers represented and authentic friendship only to find that a very short time later that those and many others would be out of lives completely while others would even will my harm. It turns out that authentic friendship (authentic community we now call it) is rare, very rare, but once you encounter it - it will bless you beyond measure.

Before I go on, I would like to mention that if you are the persons in Alaska or Russia who have been following our vacation blog, I would like to hear from you. We think that it is kinda cool!

We have been through a lot in the past year and we have experienced authentic community in ways that have touched our souls more deeply that we have ever been touched by friends.  I would love to mention them all here but I would surely leave out someone who has made a significant impact on our lives over this past year.

When we got home from our vacation on Saturday and instead of sitting around we wrapped ourselves up into true authentic community.  We went out on the river with our friends, The Clubbs.  You have seen them on this blog numerous times because they are a significant part of our daily lives.  We went out on the river and had fun.

We rode in a really cool boat:

Then in the raft 

Then we ate lunch (not pictured because we were all holding sandwiches)

Then we swam

... and kayaked

And had a lot of fun with great friends