Community green

I've been listening to Dr. Chris Green and his sermon about community. It's always a bit wonderful, joyous, frustrating and affirming when someone preaches a sermon, or teaches a teaching that is what you know but couldn't articulate nearly as beautiful. Their speech is for many something new and radical, and yet for you it is something that you've struggled to live out, yet never could scriptural base as well.
Community is hard when you look different, act odd, and don't like social gatherings. Especially when the people who are supposed to make up that community judge what you look like, disdain your hobbies, and don't make an initiative to say anything to you. I never had that problem. I am and have been a chameleon, and I also love the center stage. I didn't follow the 'wrong' things but the 'superficial' things of life like hobbies, and activities changed based on the social group. The problem I often found with this was that without people I am nothing, if I didn't love to read I would have been an empty shell of a person.
But I am married to someone whose entire life has been judged by the outward appearance which equated self-loathing and condemnation. As he has grown out of the self-focus, he has grown acutaly aware that he is a created being that God formed with purpose. Why should we hide or change or lie about who we are, when it supresses the gifts and callings our Creator gave us?
Community is not homogenous, all dressed the same, acting the same - that is gathering of clones, not a diverse expression of the Creator.
We need the broken, the narrow, the dense, or as Green said we need the walls and the donkeys to save us from our own foolishness. To show us how wrong we were, to break our stubborn selves.
But honestly what do you do, when there seems to be no one?
What if no one sees you? Reaches out to you? If no one corrects you or affirms you how can you change or stay the same?
Like a friend of mine mentioned recently, community in the New Testament was always an extension to the stranger. It wasn't a homogenous meeting of like-minded friends - it was a gathering of a family who had been given a new citizenship and this could welcome any into their community.
If only we would be willing to be as open, as vulnerable, as accessible then perhaps we'd find community to be that diverse body that reaches out to the fragmented, the outcast, the estranged, and the strange.