Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

I am believing the lie that I’m destined to be alone, and in believing that lie I’m making it into reality, because I am pulling back and judging those I love, guarding myself from them as if they were the enemies.

I want us to trade lonely and isolated lives that experience brief bursts of connectedness for intimately connected lives that know only brief intervals of feeling alone.

We’re all just kind of waiting for connection to find us. We’re waiting for someone else to initiate. Someone else to be there for us. Someone else to make the plans or ask the perfectly crafted question that helps us bare our souls.

We’ve replaced intrusive, real conversations with small talk, and we’ve substituted soul-baring, deep, connected living with texts and a night out together every once in a while,

God built us for deep connection to be part of our day-in, day-out lives, not just once in a while in the presence of a paid therapist.

We hide physically because if we aren’t seen, we can’t be known. And if we can’t be known, we can’t be rejected—or worse, have our vulnerability used to hurt us even further.

We live guarded because we fear someone will use our weakness against us.

(Being Christian means we have been freed from the slavery of sin but not from the desire of it.)

“The more resources a person gets, the more walls he or she puts up. And the more lonely they become.”

“church” was defined as a group of people, not a building for a once-a-week gathering.

Who has God put in your life—here and now and right under your nose—that you haven’t really connected with yet?

He wants us to live surrounded by people but never deeply connected to them, so we don’t change, we don’t grow, we don’t even fully live—and we mostly end up stuck in self-pity about how we don’t have any friends when dozens of people in front of us certainly would welcome someone reaching out to them at the very least.

To have deeper conversations, we have to learn the art of asking more intentional questions.

God wanted them to come out of sin and hiding and shame and come back into relationship with Him.

Jesus said that the person who has been forgiven much, loves much.[3] So, too, the things that sent us into hiding are the very tools God redeems to pull us out of hiding and so that, in love, we can go pull other people out of hiding.

To build deep friendships will require a lot of intentional, active listening. If you have a perspective to offer, ask for permission to share it.

accountability calls us to who we were meant to be,

Give permission to only certain people to speak truth into your life. Look for people who will call you up higher, not those who will let things slide.

We realize that our little spot on planet Earth, the color of our skin, the privilege we carry from parents who own homes and have secure incomes, the church we attend, the level of education we received—all this has shaped our opinions and perspectives.

Pride is the great cover-up for the fact that we are all sinners, in need of grace.

Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the snake. Pride sinks them both.

We may be able to put a Band-Aid on each other’s issues, but what if we pointed our friends to the ultimate Physician instead of our quick fixes? Going to Jesus is where you start to see supernatural life change.

be slow to call out other people’s sin, while being quick to ask them to call out our sin.

Discipleship is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and very messy.”

Now hear me: you can do hard things.

We love others in the manner in which we ourselves were loved. Equally true: we tend to hurt others in the manner in which we ourselves have been hurt.

It is a lie from the devil that we should be independent and self-sufficient!

If you feel competitive with others, ask yourself why. And then choose instead to blow up someone’s phone celebrating their efforts. It will start to change your perspective.

Quit waiting for people to reach out to you. Start initiating.

You and I don’t need fifty people to know our hard, but we do need a few who are in it with us.