In the next few months I’m going to be moving back to Sarnia, my hometown, for good. I’ve been looking forward to moving back to Sarnia for quite sometime now and its finally happening along with theStory church plant. Instead of moving back with my parents like any good poor university student would do I have decided to move into my own place with my friend Ron. There is a number of reasons I want to do this. First, I want to be able to enact what our community longs to be. One of those things is having a value of hospitality, opening the doors of our homes to each other and the community around us. It is difficult to do this when you don’t really own the home.

Yesterday on our search for a place to rent, we came across a set of four townhouses that were all for sale as one purchase. It was only $165, 000 for all four. Ron and I spent the rest of the day having friends who have been in the landlord business for a long time check out the place and confirm that it was a good deal and dreaming up ideas of what we would do with this place if we owned it. I had looked at these townhouses before they went for sale, so it was almost an answer to prayer I thought that they would randomly go up for sale a week later. We could live in one of them and rent out the other three and the life that everyone wants us to live would start.

After a lot of prayer and way too many long conversations, Ron and I decided that this probably wouldn’t be the best choice for us to do. Depending on tenants in a low-income area is pretty risky and with us both already possessing student loans, we thought we’d be best to take it easy for a while.

Yesterday however confirmed a dream that has been stirring in my heart for a while now. It is the dream of living as a community. I just imagined owning that townhouse complex in about ten years and bringing the rent down to next to nothing and opening the doors of the other three townhouses to friends and people that are part of our community and doing life together. I imagined us eating and cooking together, spending time together instead of running to the comfort of our TV’s. I imagined a lot of things to be honest and those townhouses worked perfect into those dreams. It was sort of a downer to not go after the purchase of it.

I went to Nidus Festival this weekend and saw Shane Claiborne speak and he has been living in a commune for quite a while. His stories inspired me, and stories of communities all over the world inspire me.

The more I read about living in community, the more I dream about it the more I can’t wait to do it. Living with my closest friends in Toronto in Apartment 109 was the greatest living experience of my life, and to repeat that would be the only other way that I can imagine living. Escaping to a big house where my wife and I live alone and cut our grass alone and eat every meal alone and clean house alone and watch tv alone is not my idea of a life. Living in a cheap house, with my greatest friends close by is my idea of living. Have you ever thought about trying something like this? What stopped you? What scares you about it? What do you like about it?

Over the last little while I have been around people/organizations that have a deep rooted desire to help the poor and dedicate their lives doing so. I live with the family in Hamilton that was committed into moving into the downtown area to be where they were ministering, which is next door to the third poorest neighborhood in Canada. I just went to New Orleans where we saw people working to get many that were poor (and rich) off their feet and back into their lives. Oddly, the more I have been reading lately the more I’m realizing how much the poor is central to the gospel message.

Now that I am beginning to look for my own place to live back in the city where we are planting theStory I am left with a choice. The decision is deeper than simply choosing a great house which is the best for my money and the best investment. The decision is whether I’m more concerned with my reputation/security/”success” than I am with moving into an area where I could potentially put all those things at risk. So here I am left with this choice of where I want to live, and when I mention the different area’s here in Sarnia where I want to live I get the oddest of looks. Why would you want to move there? But the best house turnovers for your money are in this area. Do you trust the area and the people?

I am starting to realize that society’s norm is so completely opposite of what the kingdom looks like that we have completely created an entire new set of beliefs to comfort us in knowing that whatever we choose is all right. Before maybe someone would choose to live in a “lesser” neighborhood because they wanted to save some money, or maybe it was because they had friends there or they liked the community aspect of it. But now we’ve actually convinced ourselves that we are unsafe and stupid to move into certain areas, thus creating a cloud of judgment for all those that already live there. Now we think that anyone who lives elsewhere in the “nicer” of neighborhoods is better off and we all need to reach to attain where they are.

With all that said, I’m starting to think that the kingdom doesn’t really care what neighborhood we live in. That maybe, whatever neighborhood we find ourselves in we learn to be content where we are and create an environment around us of contentment and purpose, not failure and the need to go one step further. Imagine someone moving into the poorest neighborhood in town that financially didn’t fit where they were, and imagine they were content being there. Now imagine how everyone around them would feel. No longer does their neighborhood become just a step to where they are “supposed” to be but now becomes where they want to be. Our poor neighborhoods are transformed without a cent being tossed at it. Afterall, technically our poor neighborhoods are a hundred times better off than how people used to live hundreds to thousands of years ago. Our poor neighborhoods are very subjective in that we compare them to what our rich neighborhoods look like.

Living as a kingdom person, we are now able to be content when the world around us is striving for more. This means that we can live in what in our world is considered poor and still live as if we were rich, or better. Living as a kingdom person means transcending the ideals that society throws at us saying that we are a certain type of person because we live a certain type of way and receives all its value from Christ. So no matter where we live, rich or poor, dirty or clean, on a beach house or with a flooded basement let us remember that we are always living rich and we can actually be content (not faking it) without all the things that the world tells us we need.