In order to have community with a person you must have a right relationship with them. This means two things; you must know the person (there is no right relationship where there is no relationship), and forgiveness must be a priority in the relationship.

Forgiveness is necessary because in every relationship, big and small, there are annoyances, wrongs, and frustrations that must be over come. Merely overlooking these issues will only get you by in the short run. To maintain a relationship that has longevity and depth, there must be forgiveness. Real forgiveness.

If you are like me, you understand this because you need it. We all need it. Forgiveness is a grace afforded us that we have not earned but can appreciate as a gift. We must seek that forgiveness when we are wrong, and we must be intentional about giving forgiveness to those who wrong us.

Lets imagine a relationship that doesn’t involve what I call “intentional forgiveness”. You have known this person for years. For the first few months of your friendship everything was going well and it seemed like you might have found a great friend. Then, over the course of time that person’s selfishness started showing through. Rather than possibly offending your new friend, you decided to shrug it off. The problem is, every time this selfishness shows through now, it’s harder to shrug off. Eventually you find yourself avoiding your friend, after all, they are only interested in themselves and don’t really care about you anyway.

Because you chose to avoid the discomfort of forgiveness, you forfeited what looked to be a promising friendship. Intentional forgiveness isn’t easy, it’s not comfortable or convenient, sometimes it requires that we have difficult conversations, but this type of forgiveness is the key to deep community among friends.

In a real relationship, where there is a deep level of community, there are always uncomfortable encounters of intentional forgiveness. I’m not saying this is easy. Relationships are hard. Developing community within a relationship is even harder. There’s no fast track to deep relationships, intimacy (community) only comes after working through something difficult together. Intentional forgiveness, for you, or from you, is one of those difficult processes that must happen in the development of real community.

This, of course, is just one component of what it takes to build real, deep community. More thoughts on this are coming…

What are your thoughts?