Just returned back to Davison,MI from an amazing weekend with friends. Spent time reflecting about community efforts, invited new friends to a space where they can explore the reality of their community and made plans to explore themes of Service to Humanity.
Highlight: Drumming with baby Samira, meeting amazing souls and hearing narratives from other communities.
When a dedicated team of believers focuses its attention on fostering activity in a neighbourhood or village, these friends need to be given latitude to function in a manner that is in harmony with an unfolding organic process and be provided with appropriate support from institutions. They need time to learn how to respond to the demands of growth within a receptive population: how to form genuine friendships, what teaching activities are effective, and how to channel resources to sustain such a growth process. It is not necessary, or even productive, for everyone in the cluster to focus on the neighbourhood. Yet, often it has been found that progress in a neighbourhood or village can infuse a new energy and optimism in endeavours across the rest of the cluster, providing a fresh impulse to its forward movement and to the process of community building under way in all areas.
As multiple activities are concentrated in the small, relatively cohesive areas of a neighbourhood or village, the transformative impact of the spiritual and social forces at work are more readily noticed by the population at large. Parents see their children and youth progressing before their eyes and recognize that the social relations of their community have been imbued with a new spirit. Entire families are sometimes drawn to participate in the life of the Bahá’í community and embrace its teachings. And efforts are eventually “sustained by human resources indigenous to the neighbourhood or village itself–by men and women eager to improve material and spiritual conditions in their surroundings”
(International Teaching Centre, Insights from the Frontiers of Learning, April 2013, Sections 3.3)
Thanks for the photo, Kat 😉
Unrestrained 