The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

by Andy Crouch

the one thing that you cannot enhance, supercharge, or outsource in human life is the one thing we most need: the patient process of search and recognition, absence and return, rupture and repair that adds up to being known.

“Most of us want to be a force,” Dave says. “But Jesus calls us to be a taste.”

grow up in this environment, spending all the formative years of your life in it, and your very epigenetics, the expression of your genes, will be shaped by the constant vigilance that comes from knowing that you are on your own, that your neighborhood is on its own, that your people are on their own, unprotected and unrecognized as sacred. No wonder you will turn to any community, no matter how violent it may be toward outsiders, if it promises to take you under its canopy of trust. Canopies of trust can be small and temporary.