Tuesday, January 31, 2012

WHEN COMMUNITIES GET LOST

Recently, a group of us in Virginia gathered with one of our clergy peers, Jan Holton from Yale Divinity School, to think about the nature of community.

During the time of the "Lost Boys of Sudan", orphans of war wandered for hundreds of miles as refugees in east central Africa.   Along their meandering journey, they would sometimes run into wild animals, specifically lions. They learned that their only hope of defense against a lion was to put the small children in the center of a human circle, and for the older children to surround them facing outward, in order to create the perception of something that was bigger than the lion.