We are wiling away our Sunday in good ways, with coffee and conversation. Honest questions and solid answers. Communing in life.

It is good that The Bird and I decided to do our series on community this week and I hope you'll keep coming back for it each day this coming week. I say it is good, though, because it has been a challenge for me in this season.

I am built for community. We all are, I think. We are built for communing and sharing and partaking, mourning and rejoicing with. We are built to need.

But there has never been a time in my life where community has felt further from me. I am from a culture where doors are always open, extra space at the dinner table is always made, schedules are cleared for relationships and where personal space is rarely a consideration (sometimes to a fault).

In my last home I never knew who would be sleeping on our couch, floor, or upstairs room when I woke up in the morning. We lived outside in. We lived transparently and openly with anyone who would cross the threshold of Home. All were welcome.

I miss this life.

No matter how often I say, hey, our doors are always open, it just doesn't seem to happen here in the way in which I'm accustomed.

This isn't bad. It would be bad if it were ongoing. But I understand that I am new here and things take time.

But I'm not content to have it stay this way.

So I am grateful for a visiting brother this week--one of the people who has taught me through blood, sweat and tears, that God sets the lonely in families and sometimes he uses lone individuals to BE family. I have always been set in families, my entire life, my natural family, my church family, my makeshift family--all these groups of people who take literally the mandate "be fruitful and multiply" even without the transference of genes and DNA.

I am the product of families.

And I am learning so deeply that I am creating a family even now. I am investing in my future family by creating family right now.

I do not have to wait for natural or adopted children, a husband's vision, a life shared in marital covenant. I begin now to create family, habits that I want my home to be identified by, a spirit that I want my habitat to encompass. I begin now to seek lonelies and create havens. My family. My community.