If community is about anything, it’s about living well with others. For something so fundamental to everyone’s experience, it is amazing that we often don’t know how to live well with others. I’m convinced that many relationship problems are the result of simply not being generous enough with each other.
Each of us can be rude, thoughtless, self-preoccupied, forgetful, ignorant, impatient, and even lazy. Even when we are trying to diligently live a life of kindness, our journey will include making mistakes and failing our ideals. This is the human condition, of which we all partake.
It would be helpful to compare our weaknesses with other people’s strengths, rather than our strengths with other people’s weaknesses. Doing so can help us become more generous. Generosity, in this context, basically means we’re willing to freely put up with the difficulty other people’s weaknesses cause us because we recognize that the difficulties we present to others are no less troubling.
Paul tells us in that familiar passage in 1 Cor. 13 that love is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. In other words, love is generous. We just won’t be able to live well with others if we’re not generous. Community requires generosity.