Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

by Justin Whitmel Earley

Where is the gathering space where your family meets the world and sits to talk? Maybe this means putting a picnic table in your front yard, setting up a basketball hoop on the curb, leaving your back fence open, or tearing down a fence between two yards.

It should be the default that we live near family and friends—unless a calling (which may be an important job) calls us away.

Whether this is done by trading babysitting, doing sabbath “family” meals together, vacationing together, or something else, if you don’t live near your family, consider how you can make the body of Christ the family support network you need.

Gatherings of friendship can make a place into what one might call “thin space”—where the lines between heaven and earth seem to mingle.

A little over a year ago, about ten other friends and I bought a really cheap thirty acres west of Richmond. It’s all woods. Mostly thorns. Half flooded and basically undevelopable. (That’s why it was so cheap.) But we bought it because we wanted a place to tie ourselves, and our children, to land—and thus to one another.

To date, we’ve cut a couple of trails in the woods, started work on a big tree-fort in a grand beech, cleared a place for a firepit, and gotten out for a few camping trips with the kids. Which is to say that mostly, it’s all plans for the future. But the land is already beginning to sing with the memories of friendship. In a decade, we hope the song will be heard for miles and miles and all kinds of new people will come dance to it.