Goodbye Pittsburgh

Well today is my last day at the Pittsburgh Project. Yesterday, was the big shebang and involved celebrating at a wonderful Lebanese place in Squirrel Hill, which was then followed by a ping pong tournament (go Team Awesome!), and concluded with board games and apple-mint tea at Tim’s. My favorite portion of the night involved the five of us (Emily, Anthony, Brandon, Ray, and myself) revealing our visions for each others futures. Apparently I will be moving after graduate school to Eureka, California where I will be involved in an adult softball league and pursued by a half-Filipino man.

Through this process I realized how much we have come to know each other characteristics, passions, and dreams. I realized how much we have become a community. And community truly is a beautiful thing. Dorothy Day suggests that by being engaged in relationships within communities we can lift each other up and transcend. That community creates a people who are interdependent, serving, and sacrificial, and who have a deeper understanding of the beauties of the faith that can be found in relationships with one another.

Often I find that I am focused on myself which then results in me missing out the beauties that can be birthed out of community living. Due in part to a plethora of issues regarding pride, vulnerability, and other emotions, a tension exists between this aspect of the faith and myself. However, by ignoring this need to exist in community I am actually hindering my understanding of Christ’s love. We are Christ’s body. Each of us has a specific function and calling within community. By not participating we are obstructing the beauty that is the place of community. When people get the chance to interact, know, and appreciate each other through different situations and tests of faith, they get to know God and each other.

I will miss this community that I have been part of the past couple of months. For they have helped me to start becoming the person I am called to be.