As a newlywed and a new mother, I built exactly the life I wanted. The only thing missing was everyone else.
I don’t remember when I realized I didn’t have a community.
Perhaps it was one Sunday after our church service when, holding my nine-month-old son, I stepped from the nursing room into the sanctuary and felt, with horrible déjà vu, exactly the way I had felt as a 14-year-old immigrant entering an American school for the first time. I saw a sea of faces I didn’t recognize—people divided into their own friend groups, smiling, chatting, nodding. Everybody seemed to belong somewhere, and I was like a newcomer to a church I had been attending for five years.
Or perhaps it was the Saturday when my mother was getting scanned for pancreatic cancer in South Korea and my husband, David, was out of town. I was solo parenting at home, trying not to cry in front of my son, Tov. I longed for a friend to appear at my door and sit with me, pray out loud, or play with Tov while I washed tears off my face.
I didn’t think much about community until I really needed one and it wasn’t there.
Christians are familiar with Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” This verse is most often applied to marriage, but it is an inescapable reality that the Creator, who himself dwells in community as three persons in one, created all humankind to be with and for other people. It is not good to be alone because we were not made to be alone. We burst from our mothers’ wombs screaming for touch.
But as we grow older and more self-sufficient, distracted by life’s burdens, we learn to live independently, like accommodating a broken ankle. And so onward we limp, relationally crippled, until we face a steep hill and realize we need help.
The modern forces of loneliness, writes …