Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

…I realized my people had been building memories together and sharing experiences without me. It had been so long since I was available to hang out, they had finally stopped calling. In my mind they had moved on together, and I was now alone on the outside.

Every human is looking to be: — Seen Soothed Safe

We don’t just want to be seen; we want to tell a friend or loved one about our disappointments and hopes and find comfort as well. We want to be seen and comforted, and we want to be safe. But we aren’t always safe.

Sometimes it’s a deeper reality: life has been so chaotic and stressful for so many years that you accidentally didn’t invest in your relationships, and when you look up, your people are gone.

You have something to celebrate or grieve and no one to celebrate or grieve with.

You are looking at the weekend and don’t have a single plan. Unless you initiate or go it alone, you won’t have anything to do.

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.

You need to talk but don’t know whom to call.

You haven’t had anyone genuinely listen to you in so long that you honestly can’t remember t...

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.

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 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.

Even if you’re an introvert, we all are physically, emotionally, and spiritually hardwired by God for relationship. From the moment you were born until you take your last breath, deep, authentic connection is the thing your soul most craves. Not just as an occasional experience, but as a reality woven into every day of your life.

We spend our evenings and weekends tucked into our little residences with our little family or our roommates or alone, staring at our little screens. We make dinner for just us and never want to trouble our neighbors for anything. We fill a small, little crevice called home with everything we could possibly need, we keep our doors locked tight, and we feel all safe and sound. But we’ve completely cut ourselves off from people outside our little self-protective world. We may feel comfortable and safe and independent and entertained. But also we feel completely sad.

Is this living? Is this how life is supposed to go?

You know what you were actually built for? Long, meaningful conversations with people who have known you for years and would donate their kidney if you needed it. People who drop by with pizza and paper plates unannounced because they missed you and aren’t afraid to intrude. Regular unscheduled and unhurried time with people who feel like family, even if they aren’t. 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 show up early to help you cook and stay late to clean up. 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 belong to each other.

I begin this journey with you aware of two things: People make up the best parts of life. People make up the most painful parts of life.

This was not my friends’ fault, of course. They had obligations, commitments, relationships, and jobs of their own. In fact, they likely were asking the same questions about me: “Does Jennie know what’s going on in my life? Does she even care?”

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.

community is bigger than two or three friends. Community should be the way we live. Historically and practically, people in all countries and generations have found their friends from their larger village of interconnected people.

there are scientific studies that show how many relationships we can manage and how we socially interact with people. Basically, we can handle a network of only about 150 people.

Inside that 150 are layers of friendship that deepen with how much time you spend with a person and the degree of your relationship with them. 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. And within our village, we have a capacity to make five of them our BFFs. You read that right. Only five!

“Every newborn comes into this world looking for someone looking for her.”[3] And that never quits being true. You and I are both a little needy.

yet it’s hard to need people. No, it’s terrifying to need people, because sometimes when we acknowledge our need, we feel like there is no one who wants to take our call in the middle of the mess.

deep down I wonder if anyone would really even want to be in the middle of that cry with me. Which is ironic, because when Lindsey calls me crying, nothing means more to me. That phone call makes me feel needed, and who doesn’t want someone to need them?

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. But let’s face it: whether we live lonely or deeply connected, life is messy. The magic of the best of relationships is the mess, the sitting-together-on-the-floors-of-bathrooms, hugging-and-sobbing mess.

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 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 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 were tight… Until we were not.

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

as much as I love my family, there is something about the vision of dear friends cooking together and sharing the daily mundane that sounds pretty perfect to me.

Even if a house full of friends isn’t your dream come true, you were built by God for deep relationships.

our God has been relational forever. It means that He created us out of relationship for relationship—and not a relationship that is surface level or self-seeking. No, the relationship He has in mind for us is… sacrificial, intimate, moment-by-moment connection.

We weren’t just built for community; we were built because of it.

The Bible doesn’t speak to individuals. It’s written for people living out their faith together! And this all matters so much because… We make each other better.

We remind each other of God and His plans for us.

We fight for each other to not be distracted by sin.

We complete each other.

We need each other to live out the purposes of God.

How arrogant are we to think that even though the God of the universe exists in community, our little fragile finite selves can survive without it? No, there is a beautiful God-built plan for having our souls be full, satisfied.

We are called to be a community of people, on a mission, delighting in God, delighting in each other, redeemed and reconciling the world, bringing them and inviting them into this family. This is the ultimate purpose of community. Yes, it is to encourage you. —

Yes, it is to comfort you. Yes, it is to fight for you. But ultimately community is meant to open the doors wide to every person on earth and invite them into a family that exists forever with God.

We all crave a collective belonging. Because God built us for it.

Bottom line, people were in each other’s business. But that has all radically changed. Our priorities no longer center on “we” but on “me.”

Independence has become the chief value in this country. We are brainwashed that “being a self-made woman” (or man), “making our own way,” and striving for “personal achievement” are the goals of our brief, beautiful lives. For generations now, we have taken the bait, believing that siloed, individualistic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps living will somehow satisfy in the end.

“I think your kids will be fine, Jennie. I just worry about you. I’m afraid you’ll be lonely starting over in such a big city.”

Life was a little isolated but predictable.

Caroline Parker taught me in short order that my little village here was going to (1) come because of my neediness and desperation, not in spite of it, and (2) be built in unexpected ways and with unexpected people.

the art of making and keeping friends was never really spelled out for most of us. We learned how to read and write and name the planets, dress ourselves, get a job, and even have sex, but no one ever really sat down and taught us how to make a friend or how to be a friend.