Together Is a Blessing

Two weekends ago, my community and I got to travel to New York City, which is something we’ve talked about doing basically since we moved in. Since it’s not guaranteed that any of us will live in this state again, it was clear that visiting the city was an essential part of our collective effort to soak up everything New York state has to offer during our FrancisCorps year. As such, it wasn’t a surprise that our one full day in the city was packed full of visiting all sorts of sights like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Times Square, and Central Park. Given how jam-packed the day was, one of my community members mentioned when we got home that she was surprised at how well I handled all the hustle and bustle. This makes sense when you consider that I’ve always been the kind of person who does better with some sense of the plan, has a history of getting overstimulated in very crowded environments, and easily scored highest on introversion in the Myers-Briggs personality test we all took during Orientation Retreat. And yet somehow I didn’t mind a day full of trekking across a strange city and changing our plans as we went. I didn’t mind because we were together and I knew that if something went wrong, we would figure it out together and Madeline and Karlie would look out for me. It turns out big things like starting a kickball team, pulling together your first holiday celebration, and even taking on New York City as well as the “small” gems of community life like kitchen chats, car debriefs, and occasionally taking the wrong train are all better together.

Community has definitely been the highlight of my FrancisCorps experience thus far so there are any number of things I could say about the joy and fullness it has brought to my life this year. I knew when I left school that I wanted to step into my next chapter with a community since that was such a large part of what made my college experience as special as it was. Even so, I could not have anticipated how much community life would fill me up as I pour myself out in service and how much my community members’ encouragement, support, and accompaniment would allow me to more fully embrace all that Syracuse has to offer outside of work hours as well, lots of which I’m sure I’d be too intimidated to try on my own. Community has also been teaching me a lot about balance as I learn to accept that it’s not something you find once and hold onto forever but something you continue to re-navigate every day as you move forward together. Some days stepping into community means allowing my housemates to pull me into something more adventurous than I might do by myself and some days it means knowing when I need to recharge on my own so that I can be more fully present in the things to come. After all, I’ve found that stepping into community often involves sharing different sides of ourselves as we take on new things, something I’m excited to see come into play in some of our upcoming retreats and in hopefully introducing Karlie and Madeline to skiing in the new year! Whatever lies ahead, I am looking forward to continuing to discover what God has in store for us and the rest of our year, together.

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