Can we be this kind of church family?

Excerpted from "Searching for God Knows What," by Donald Miller

"The way John writes about Jesus makes you feel that the sum of our faith is a kind of constant dialogue with Jesus about whether or not we love Him. I grew up believing a Christian didn't have to love God or anybody else; he just had to believe some things and be willing to take a stand for the things he believed....John seemed to embrace the relational dynamic of our faith. And he did so i n a n honest tone, not putting a spin on anything. He revealed how some of the disciples truly understood Jesus and how they were screw ups, and he didn't make himself look good, either; he just told it exactly as it was. That's guts, if you ask me. And then,not unlike Paul, John closed his book with a lot of sentimental talk, very to the point, but charged with meaning. He ended his book by telling the reader he was going to die. There were some people around back then who wondered if John was ever going to die because they had overheard Jesus say John would live forever, and because John got tortured and should have died early on, a lot of people assumed Jesus saw saying John was going to live forever on earth.
This is beautiful and meaningful because John wrote his essay a long time after Christ had left so he was very old, probably early ninety years old, and this was back when communities loved old people. They didn't put them in homes to watch television; they gathered around them because they represented a kind of gentle beauty and wisdom. This was back when you didn't have to be all young and sexy just to be a person. And it makes you wonder if John saw and wrote that he was going to die knowing within a few days, a few weeks, a month of gentle good-byes, he was going to go home and leave all his friends, and he didn't want any of them to be surprised or scared.
When you read the book you start realizing that people who were very close to John read this essay and got to the end and started crying because John was telling them he was going to leave, and then I'll bet at his funeral everybody was standing around thinking about how John knew he was going to die and told them in his book. And I'll bet they sat around that night at somebody's house, and somebody who had a very good reading voice lit a candle, and they all lay on the floor and sat on pillows. The children sat quietly and the man with the voice read through the book, from beginning to end, and they thought together about Jesus as the man read John's bock, and when it came to the end where John says he is going to die, the person who was reading got choked up and started to cry. Somebody else, maybe John's wife or one of his daughters, had to go over and read the end of it, and when she was finished they sat around for a long time and some of the people probably stayed the night so the house wouldn't feel empty. It makes you want to live in a community like that when you think about the way things were when Jesus had touched people.
A community like that might sound far-fetched, but when you read through John's other books, the short ones, all he talks about is if you know Jesus, you will love you brother and sister, and anybody who talked that much about loving your brother and sister was probably the most beloved person in their community, and when he died people would have felt a certain pain about it for a long, long time."