Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

Because most of us choose to hold on to friends from past residences and past lives, believing that since nobody who is right here in front of us will ever measure up to those precious people, why bother making new friends?

If you are trying to make friendship an addendum to your busy schedule, it will never work. You have to build it as you’re going. Relationships should arise out of your everyday places and your everyday activities.

But we all need a network of regular people who are present in our daily lives.

You will never have friends unless you are willing to consistently initiate. Be the one who reaches out.

But each time over the past three years that I have chosen to drop the facade of “I’m great, thanks,” and initiate conversations about how I’m really doing and what the other person really needs, God has handed me the most life-giving exchanges imaginable.

We see enough of Jesus’s life in the Gospels to know that He was an incredible initiator. He noticed people. He stopped for a conversation. He even invited Himself over to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner.

Community should, in its truest form, reflect aspects of who God is and how He loves. Which brings me to a question: Who has God put in your life—here and now and right under your nose—that you haven’t really connected with yet?