Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

Every human is looking to be: — Seen Soothed Safe

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 have the kind of friends who won’t leave me alone until I tell them everything.

One by one I went to my people and did exactly what I used to be terrified to do: I openly acknowledged that I needed them. I fought back against the lie that had threatened to take me down. I am not alone. I am not a fraud. I have people.

Scientists now warn that loneliness is worse for our health than obesity, smoking, lack of access to health care, and physical inactivity.[2]

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 make up the best parts of life. People make up the most painful parts of life.

And if you’ll forgive and fight for the people who have hurt you deeper than you could ever imagine.

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 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.

Basically, we can handle a network of only about 150 people.

Research suggests that we can handle only fifty people in what we will call our acquaintances. Within those fifty people, there are fifteen people in our village.

within our village, we have a capacity to make five of them our BFFs. You read that right. Only five!

How much time you spend face to face with a person is what determines where they fit in your 150.

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.

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.

And I thought, 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.

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

Outside of Jesus, relationships are the greatest gifts we have on earth and simultaneously the most difficult part of being alive.

we started vision casting about the retirement house on the beach we will one day share after our husbands are gone. We were joking (kind of), but the idea of deep-down communal living made my heart sing,

We look to people to complete and fill what only God was meant to fill. This is the primary reason we all are so unhappy with each other. We have put our hope in imperfect people.

If God is in the center of our relational circle, we will be fulfilled, and out of that fulfillment we can bless others. But if people are in the center of our relational circle, we end up pulling on others to meet needs that they can’t ever fully meet.

When you have God in the right place, at the center of your affections, you will more likely get people right.

The Enemy Hates Community Think about it: if God is relationship and He created us for relationship, then guess who hates it?

The enemy wants to divide us. Rather than fighting for each other, he wants to see us fighting against each other.

Christ followers enter human relationships full of hope and full of confidence to love others, regardless of the treatment they receive in return.

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

But that has all radically changed. Our priorities no longer center on “we” but on “me.”

And then came the birth of social media in 1997, which rewards personal-branding continuity and snarky one-upmanship with “likes.”

We are meant to live in community, moment by moment, breath by breath. Not once a week or once a month at a night out with friends or during lunch after emerging from an isolated cubical.

We wait for those perfect few friends to come along, and then we look for them to play so many roles in our lives. We look to them to be everything to us. What if the power of a little team of friends is that each one brings different things to your life?

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

Researchers say that to grow an acquaintance to a good friend takes clocking two hundred hours together.

The enemy loves us to self-protect, and sometimes he will use our pain and sometimes he will use our shame.

Because shame can make people mean.

The enemy’s strategy is to push us deep into shame and sin and to make us feel so isolated and guilty that we would never admit our struggle aloud.

The devil is good at his job. Not only does he use shame to strip us of connection and community, but his whisper invades our thinking and multiplies the pain: It’s your own fault that you’re alone.

To Be Fully Loved Requires Being Fully Known

We have no use for empty platitudes. It’s the “I know you and I love you” that we crave.

Hurting people hurt others.

you will only be as close to a friend as you are vulnerable with her.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” C. S. Lewis famously wrote.

“As iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs says, “so one person sharpens another.”

Choose friends who have the potential to make you better. Then allow them to do just that.

Accountability isn’t just about sin avoidance or sin mitigation. It’s about challenging and inspiring one another, telling a friend she’s underestimating her abilities or urging her to take a risk when you see her holding back instead of dreaming big for God.

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

“For just as each of us has one body with many members,” we read in Romans 12, “and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”[3]

God gives the people who follow Him a shared purpose, along with gifts that require us to depend on each other to accomplish that purpose.

You want to know one of the biggest problems we face when it comes to friendship? We mistakenly think friendship is about us.

As members of the body of Christ, we are to love each other and God so well that other people want this love and follow Jesus.