Are You Lacking Balance, Community, or Purpose?

My over-a-decade younger self used to teach English 101 and 102 as a graduate teaching assistant. After getting my feet wet the first quarter, I decided to not play it quite so safe and predicable, and changed up each course every time I taught it. I think it was the second quarter of 101 that I played music from IndiaChristian.com as my students found their seats (I was banking on the fact that no one would even know I was playing Christian music in the classroom). I wanted my students to really know who I was because I knew that connection could help me draw their own best writing out, so I told them a bit about how important international travel was to me and shared about my desire to one day live in India and the time I had spent in Thailand, letting them read between the lines as they may about whether I was talking about mission work.

Sometimes I want to wish back some of that passionate energy from my barely-bridging-into-my-twenties years—the ideas for class the next morning I would jot down in the dark and attempt to decipher while power-walking across campus, the journal prompts I wrote to help my students fill journals I’d picked out for them because I wanted them to not be afraid to start writing, the international fairytales and treats I brought in on Fridays, the classroom hours we exchanged for individual and group conference slots, me hoping and praying my voice would hold out for the hours-long stints of talking.

I wanted to teach because it was a platform to speak into the lives of freshman who needed positive role models more than they could articulate at the time. In treating my students like they mattered, I myself felt so very alive.

It’s funny isn’t it, how the more you give yourself away the more you find yourself?

The more you exhale life and hope and respect the more it saturates you as well.

The more you value others the more your heart swells.

Today I reflect on last night—neighbors congregating in our driveway, adults conversing and checking out the car we just got and the kids taking turns doing tricks down the acro mat. And I have to wonder if treating people like they matter always makes us come alive.

I want to feel alive on the inside, deep down in the core of me.

As an Enneagram 9, I can be self-forgetting, put what makes me come alive on the backburner and get caught up in all the hurrying and helping and striving to keep everyone happy and conflict at bay. So after I graduated from my program and was no longer teaching, I also stopped writing—stopped because I felt it was selfish to take time away from kissing bruised knees and taking the kids to places to play and later homeschooling them. I loved all the people in my life, but the fire inside me had dimmed, and life felt mostly monotonous.

If you are in a season where you don’t feel deeply alive, I invite you to pause right where you are and answer this question for yourself. In my current season what I feel I am most lacking is balance, community, or purpose?

There is more than one way, for sure, to right a life that feels out balance, soothe the ache for community, and supply a lack of purpose. What I would like to explore together, though, is how living missionally in your own neighborhood provides an answer for each of these questions. Perhaps you don’t know what in the world it even means to live on mission. Don’t worry, we will cover that too!

Balance

A life out of balance might feel like grasping at straws lifted by a stiff breeze. It may feel like a lack of control, or like the things that should be most important are in all the wrong order. Perhaps you are always running and doing all the things, but it all feels a bit pointless if you really stop to think about it. Or perhaps your life reveals that your priority is yourself, or your job, or your comfort, or your fear. We could go on, but the main thing is that when we feel out of balance, something is off, and the things we are pursuing aren’t really giving us what we are looking for.

May I propose to you that living in a way that intentionally welcomes your neighbors into your heart, home, and life can help us find some of the balance we crave. In order to welcome our neighbors into our everyday, ordinary lives, we may need to do the hard work of creating some white space in our schedules; this margin is instrumental in creating opportunities to connect with our neighbors. Taking an honest look at our rhythms can help us see where our priorities have gotten out of whack. The adjustments we make may dissipate the pressure of all the performing and doing we can so easily get twisted up in. If we have become too inward-focused, raising our eyes to see the deep value in those who live near us may be the balancing work cut out for us.

Community

If community is what you identified as your greatest need, you might feel an undercurrent of sad sucking away the sand beneath your feet. You might be standing in a stream that is moving, but your loneliness doesn’t feel like it is going anywhere. Perhaps you have moved recently, or changed jobs or schools, or lost a good friend, or have been irreparably hurt by someone you were once close to. You long to be known in a deep and true way, but you don’t currently have the kind of friends in your life that know you and love you just the same, who won’t let you give up or give in to the voice of doubt in your head.

Hear me out on this: brave is often not one giant leap, it’s a small baby step, followed by another, then another, and another, all in the same direction. Before we know it, we have begun to form a habit, and with it changed the trajectory of our lives. Living missionally in your neighborhood does not have to scary or intimidating. You can absolutely start small, right from where and who you are today. Try lingering in your front yard after collecting the mail. Look up and smile at anyone you see. You have just taken a baby step towards connecting with that neighbor. The next step will be easier tomorrow.

Let’s talk here about what missional living is, because I think it important to know where we are heading as we take our baby steps. Living missionally in my neighborhood means posturing my heart like an open door, welcoming my neighbors into my heart, home, and life. It is also fulfilling the call of the Great Commission to be disciple-making-disciples right in my own neighborhood. This means I show my neighbors grace like God does for me, I do life with them as I do with family, and I call them up into their true identity in Christ, even as I learn how to do so myself.

We begin small, because growing friendships and forming community is not a microwave-speed process. But when we decide to lean into missional living in our neighborhood, hope infuses our lonely hearts.

Purpose

Without purpose, we may feel like we are floundering, aimless, mission-less, direction-less. Howard Thurman may captivate our attention with his words: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Yet we don’t feel alive, and we don’t know how to find something that makes us come alive.

Living on mission amongst our neighbors may not be our only purpose, but it will infuse everything about our lives with purpose and direction. Living missionally in our neighborhood is not just something we do, it’s a mindset and lifestyle transformation. We seek to learn and grow and become because the life we are living is not meant for us alone, but to help others help others help others love God and love people better; this life of ours we want to be worth imitating. We seek to build up, and encourage, and sow hope, and share life. We invite our neighbors to join us in the everyday moments of our everyday life because this is how and where discipleship happens best.

Thank you for sticking with me. I know this is long, and I love that you are still here. Is there a tug on your heart to live with greater intentionality in your neighborhood? I would love to share my one-page guide to neighborhood missional living to give you some easy, practical steps you can begin today. The free download will be sent to you if you subscribe to my email list. I promise I won’t spam you. What you can expect is simply a short, weekly email with a link to my latest blog post, and an occasional extra encouragement designed with you in mind.

Friend, may we end in prayer?

Dear Jesus, may You breathe on this spark of hope in our hearts that we can live fully alive. Whether we are seeking balance, community, or purpose, would you meet with us here, in this very moment? May we feel the warmth of your hand on our shoulder and know that whatever baby step lies before us, we will not be alone. In Your precious name we pray, amen.

Change your actual life in less than 5 minutes per day!

You can change your actual life in less than 5 minutes a day because baby steps truly can change the trajectory of your life. If you want 2021 to be the year you actually start living on mission in your neighborhood, this little book (available as a paperback and on Kindle) will help you get there. Each of the 30-day devotions takes but a few minutes to read, but they will lead to lasting life change.