Building A Healthy Community
Community of Caring was founded on its mission to “Build a Healthy Community”. We do this by promoting the values of Respect, Responsibility, Trust, Caring and Family. Every day for the 22 years that I have worked for Community of Caring, I, along with the dozens of folks I get to work with every day, witness miracles, acts of human compassion and extraordinary beauty throughout this community. While I am not blind to the not so nice side of the human condition, it is the kindness, laughter and genuine concern that I see displayed in and around the Aspen Mine Center and AMC West that I choose to focus on.
I know to the depths of my soul that most people want and need to feel useful, to have purpose and to feel connected to others. In today’s world of information overload, instant gratification and fixation on social media, we are constantly tempted to pay attention to one side of a story, to see and believe what confirms our beliefs and conditioning. By doing this we become imprisoned by our judgements: We are fixated on who is wrong, who is bad, who is not on my side of the political aisle. I have been called naïve for my tendency to put compassion above correctness. I often say that no one truly knows the answers to the societal challenges we face, but the admission that we do not know the solutions is the first step toward truly beginning to work together to find out. Let’s not just confirm what the answer should be based on our views as a conservative, as a liberal, as a Christian or Muslim. Let’s commit to finding out together, moving forward together and feel deeply the connection of being human. It is easy to be critical, to be cynical, to have an opinion based on very little information. It is quite arduous, quite challenging to commit to finding out the facts of an issue, or to truly get to know someone with opposing views. It takes a long time to build a bridge, it takes only seconds to blow them up and burn them. What do you say we spend a bit more time building bridges!
Gratitude, humility and the willingness to bring out the very best in each other seems to me to somehow rise above the politics. At least I have witnessed it often through the work I get to do each day. I love this community and I believe we have an incredible opportunity and really an obligation to work together despite our differences to build a healthier community.
I am not a Biblical Scholar, but I don’t recall much in the Bible about the God’s commandments toward faithfulness to particular political views as a conservative, liberal, democrat, republican, moderate, imperialist, capitalist, communist or socialist. I do recall a bit of the Good Book being committed to loving your neighbor, forgiveness, respect and compassion.
Humans will never agree on what is right. My personal thought is that God spends a lot of time being entertained by watching us argue about how much we know, when really we don’t know much at all. I really think that all the Big Guy really wants, the true reason for our existence is to admit that we don’t know, that life’s great mystery isn’t really meant to be found out, but it is only to learn how to get along, to be loving, to be compassionate, to be humble and grateful as we all walk along the road to share this journey together. Wouldn’t that be a kick?!
Ted Borden, Community of Caring Executive Director
