I started going to School of Community when a friend invited me and honestly everything everyone said went way over my head and I literally couldn’t follow anything they said. I know now that it was such an intense and almost unrecognizable experience that I just didn’t even know where to place it in my mind and heart. I came back though again and again. And the funny thing is, I would get angry when I went. These people were so real, so honest, they talked to you past all the polite banter and normal conversation, something that I had been craving for so long and yet it was painful to experience. All the walls that I built up, all the wrong things about God and people I had learned started to get chipped away and that can hurt even though it’s a good thing. I would go every week and end up in tears trying to explain myself and, every time I thought I had some concept of Christianity down, they would break it open and want to hear the heart of the issue I was talking about and not just the cliched words I was putting on it. It was like they saw me. They saw me even more than I could see myself. The Incarnation was affecting me in that moment. I was having an experience with the living God through the flesh of another. I was experiencing the love that I had desired. And they let me love them. They let me love them the way Christ would let me love Him, with humility and honest affection. This was the experience that the first disciples must have experienced with Christ... an awareness that this Man knew them to their core and loved them. He delighted in them. He changed them by being with them. I was changed in that moment.

Rhianon, North Carolina (USA)