This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
—John 15:12–13 (NLT)
I’ve been meditating on community a lot lately. Ash Wednesday was a couple of days ago, and during this season of Lent, I’ve been trying to be more intentional about focusing less on the things that I don’t have or think that I want and more on the things that I’ve already been given. Less online window-shopping, more thank you notes. Less time spent on mindless internet video-watching, more time spent investing in (and praying for) the people around me. As a writer, as a woman of color, as a Christian, my community is so important to me. And this past year, it seems, I’ve been finding so much life the more I dig in.
John 15 (the vine and the branches) was one of the readings for our wedding last summer. In it, Christ urges His disciples to abide in Him, and also to love one another as He has loved them. This is my command, he says, to love one another. His command. It’s pretty astonishing to me (in a good, crazy kind of way) that Jesus, while giving His last set of instructions to His friends before His death, was as concerned with their relationships with one another—with the health of their community—as He was with their relationships to Him.
I’ve been so grateful for my community these past few months. At our wedding, one of the things that felt most special to my husband and me was the fact that we were supported and surrounded at every turn by the people that we loved. From the worship band made up of friends and family, to the all-nighter that our friend J pulled decorating the church, to the weeks that my mom and her friends spent carefully sculpting delicate tissue paper into flowers for the centerpieces, to the late nights my mother-in-law stayed up with us to help finish putting together favors (and more! so many people helped in so many ways), we felt loved beyond measure. When my husband landed his current job and had to move out West without me for a few months, our community in Kentucky closed ranks around me—bringing me soup and medicine when I was sick for two weeks; giving me rides; praying for me and inquiring about how I was doing. When I decided to focus on my writing again after a long dry spell, there again was community, pounding down my door: one morning at the office, I got a call out the blue from a woman named Tanya, who invited me to be a part of what turned out to be an amazing community of WOC writers, creatives, leaders, and professionals, right in my hometown. Now that I’m back in California, I’ve begun to meet regularly with M, my closest writing friend, whom I’ve long considered to be my literary co-conspirator, and it is like a long drink of water to be physically present in the same space after so many years of corresponding almost exclusively through Skype and email.
Kundiman, the community of Asian American writers that has been a constant part of my life for a few years now, has a bumper sticker it gives out at conferences that says “Kundiman is for lovers.” Because a kundiman is a love song written and sung under duress—a love song that arises out of hope and devotion to one’s people—and because what is a writer without the strength and solidarity of his or her chosen community? Certainly, I am the stronger for mine.
This Valentine’s Day, even while my husband and I are celebrating together, I’ll also be thinking about our community, and the radical ways in which their love has enabled us to grow and to thrive—both together and as individuals. John 15:13 has been running through my head constantly, and in the spirit of gratitude, I thought I’d share a little something that I made here with you.
Free Printable Files:
“No Greater Love”—Two 5″ x 7” black and white flat cards
“No Greater Love”—Two 5″ x 7” color flat cards
This little hand-lettered assortment of flat cards prints at 5″ x “7 (two to a letter-sized piece of paper or cardstock) and can be slipped into an envelope and used as notecards, framed and hung up as wall art, or glued to a card front to make a folded greeting card. The print comes in four different colorways, and to give you an idea of what you can do, I’ve come up with four different ways to treat them.
You’ll want to start by downloading one or both of the files above and printing each on a sheet of letter-sized (8.5″ x 11”) piece of cardstock or heavy paper. Make sure that you are printing in color, not grayscale (I don’t own a color printer, so I had mine printed at a copy shop nearby), and that you tell the printer to print at “actual size” (you don’t want the computer to scale it down, or you’ll end up with cards that are smaller than 5″ x 7″). Once you’ve printed the files, use a paper trimmer or a craft knife and ruler to cut each card down to size. I’ve included some gray trim marks for you so that it’s easier for you to line up your straight edge or blade with exactly where you need to cut.
Once you have the cards cut out, you can have some fun with them! I put the simplest design, the one with black text on a white background, in a clean, gold-tone frame (which you can see at the top of the post). For the card with a red background, I simply rounded the corners with a punch and paired it with an envelope to use as a notecard.
For the design that has red-and-black text, I folded a sheet of 60-lb, kraft-colored cardstock in half, trimmed it down to be slightly larger than the size of the print, and glued them together to make a folded greeting card.
As for the design with a black background and white text, I thought it looked a little bit like the night sky, so I colored in the heart and added a few scattered dots of different sizes with gold and white gel pens (the photograph shows a gold Uniball Signo gel pen and a white Gelly Roll pen, but actually, I ended up using Uniball Signos for both the gold and the white, since I liked the flow and opacity of the ink better).
Whether you’re alone or with loved ones this weekend, I hope you’ll print, cut out, and keep one or more of these cards—but even more so, that you’ll consider giving one away as an encouragement to someone who has made a difference in your life just by being there. Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s celebrate community and friendship together.