adventure and community: a revelation.

Adventure is such an amazing concept.  My dear friend, Kelsey, and I have spent endless hours discussing the wonders of adventure, dreaming of future adventures, and most definitely having the greatest of adventures.  It’s a topic I’ve frequently written and spoken of.  God beckons me with all that lays waiting within a new adventure.  Adventure is a spirit so evident in people and it draws me to them.  It’s like magnetism.  Those who love adventure bring that spirit out of others.  It’s a spirit that emboldens the timid and only makes the adventurous even more so.  The energy among adventurers is a shaken coke bottle waiting to explode with the potential it holds.

I’ve been a witness to this manifestation of adventure many times without realizing something so obvious, until a new friend pointed it out last week.

Adventure creates community.  It demands connection.  It insists upon a bond and a fellowship.  You have been joined by the experience and even without intention, you will leave being effected by one another.

In a stage and area of life where regular communal adventure doesn’t happen as regular as I’d like, I had overlooked this quality.  I began to think I was losing my taste for adventure.  No.  It’s just meant to be shared.  Life is better together.  Of course, there are wonderful solo adventures; adventures where God shows you something new and you are forever changed by communing with the Divine.  But we were made for community and nothing brings it quite like a wonderful quest, no matter for a several months or only a few hours.

Spur of the moment plans and last minute ideas.  A trip that will take you places you didn’t expect with people you’d never dreamed of knowing.  Adventure is all about exploration and going to a physical scenario that’s new and unknown.  It’s incredible that when we go there physically, our relational, emotional, and spiritual, selves beg for the same.  So we bond with those among us in a unique, real, and new way and we stand in awe as God reveals a new glimpse of Himself to us.  We leave a little more full, a little more known, and a little more aware and loving.

The power of adventure is incredible.  It demands something new of us and leaves us grown, healed, and changed.  I never realized that so much of that power is simply the power of connection with others.  God built us for community.  Who knew that an adventure-craving heart would be a way to get there.