Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

Every human is looking to be: — Seen Soothed Safe

Here’s what we do: We spend hours alone in our crowded, noisy, screen-lit worlds, we invest only sporadic time with acquaintances, and then we expect close friends to somehow appear in our busy lives.

You will disappoint me. I will disappoint you. God will never disappoint us.

The internet is not your village. Every problem you hear about in the news is not yours to solve. We are exhausted from trying. We need to rebuild our infrastructure with healthy villages and commit to being healthy participants in the villages that we build. There will be times it doesn’t feel like the happier, easier way. We need a deep conviction in our bones to stick with it and live not lonely.

I should mention here that the apostle Paul wasn’t afraid to caution us against aligning with unhealthy people. Paul talked about people we should avoid, those who live as if “their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame.”[4] In other words, people who are comfortable in their sin, people who mistakenly believe that they don’t need to change—those should not be the ones who make up your inner circle.

God’s idea of community is deep, intentional, day-in and day-out connection, loving at all times, bearing with one another, sticking closer than siblings, naming every sin, running our races together, encouraging each other as long as it is called today.

Remember to look for your people in unexpected places. Life stage doesn’t matter. Age doesn’t matter. Find the people who are following after Jesus, and then go with them.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” C. S. Lewis famously wrote. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable…. To love…is to be vulnerable.