Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

Your family is broken and unhealthy, when it seems everyone else is excited to be going home to see their (normal, happy, well-adjusted) families at Christmas.

Long, meaningful conversations with people who have known you for years and would donate their kidney if you needed it.

The obvious few who scream with joy when you share your awesome news and cry with you when you share your hard stuff.

People who hurt you and who are hurt by you, but who choose to work through it with you instead of both of you quitting on each other.

People who live on mission beside you, who challenge you and make you better.

People who know they are your people, and you are theirs. People who ...

the ones we’ll risk being fully known by,

the ones we’ll gladly be inconvenienced by,

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, because the superficial stuff seems more manageable and less risky.

I’m needy, just not good at admitting it. And that has consistently damaged my relationships.

I’ve hurt people. They’ve hurt me. I have failed my friends. Some have forgiven me, and some have walked away.

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 don’t do this very well in the place I come from. We don’t come together in our pain. We isolate. We insulate. We pretend. We call after the cry. — And as a result, we are flat miserable. We hole away in houses separated by fences or stay stuck in our apartments with alarms carefully set. We don’t tell the whole truth of our pain because it appears that everyone else is doing just fine. They aren’t hurting. In fact, they’re living happy, perfect lives. We decide the problem is probably us. 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.

We live alone, we eat alone, we run our errands alone, and we suffer alone. — And I’m sick of it.

When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom

I should mention here that a full 80 percent of the world’s population still exists in the context of small, community-based groups—villages, you might call them—where what’s mine is always ours.

I want to live in such a town.

Maybe the question we are really asking behind the question of “How do I make friends?” is this: “How can I belong to an intimate community of people?”

They were talking. Laughing. Filling in blanks for each other. Loving each other well. They were tight. They all were tight. This wasn’t a series of cliques; this was a community. A village. An entire town that knew everything about everyone—and was better off for it, no doubt.

“You do everything alone in America,” our good friend in Rwanda, Pastor Charles Mugisha, always reminds me. “We [Rwandans] do everything together.” For better or worse, in the traditional village structure, the people all know your name. More sobering still: they all know your pain.

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

Proximity. They enjoyed physical closeness to each other and God. Transparency. They were naked and unashamed, fully known and fully loved. Accountability. They lived under submission to God and to each other. Shared Purpose. They were given a clear calling to care for creation. Consistency. They couldn’t quit each other. They needed each other and shared everything together. These five “tastes of heaven” provide the framework for how we build healthy community in our own lives today. God established a perfect community that we can work to reclaim here and now.

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

You and I are to give that reconciliation and hope away to living, breathing, broken, longing people. God purposefully set you in your place and in your time to love people in such a way that they will feel their way toward Him and find Him.

You and I both desire deep connection. We want someone to know our deepest, darkest secrets and to love us anyway. But that type of community doesn’t come naturally. We have to look for it and then fight to protect it once we have it.

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.

choose friends who will fight for you, friends who will fight alongside you, and friends who are as committed as you are to fighting against the dark.

Express appreciation to the one who still sends you birthday cards in the mail.