The Church of the Seven Moms
"God sets the lonely in families"
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” —Mother Teresa
I have a friend—I’ll call him Aaron1—who for years was the pastor of a small church here in the Pacific Northwest. Aaron’s daughter Michelle is a radiant artist with enormous talent across a range of disciplines. But like many creative folks, including me, Michelle sometimes struggles with depression. Once when Aaron and I were traveling together, we stayed up late talking. He caught me up on what had been months of heart-wrenching pain and uncertainty—months in which, at times, Aaron and his wife, Nicole, had even feared that Michelle might harm herself.
Aaron said that his little congregation, all of whom live within a few blocks of each other, may have literally saved his family. In particular, there were these six other women in the church besides Michelle’s own mother—for a total of seven “moms”—that Michelle knew she could contact at any time of day or night. And she sometimes did. It could be three in the morning, but if Michelle called or texted, her moms would answer.
Aaron told me the story of one day in which he’d been especially grateful for the women in his daughter’s life. Aaron and Nicole were running errands in a city a couple hours from their own. Then they received a call from Michelle’s high school saying she had simply walked away from campus. This wasn’t something she had done before. Too far from home, and worried about their daughter, Aaron and Nicole started telephoning these six other moms, several of whom immediately began driving around looking for Michelle.
Michelle turned up a while later at a neighborhood ice cream shop owned by members of the church. Aaron and Nicole got a call as soon as she walked in the door. Michelle would say later how surprised she was that several women from the community “just happened” to show up at the shop right after she did. The women huddled around her, loved on her, asked her how she was. Eventually they convinced her to return to school.
As Michelle was walking back to campus she passed the house of one of her other seven moms. The woman saw her from the front porch. Concerned, she invited Michelle inside. Then she called Aaron and Nicole, saying, “Don’t worry. Michelle is with me. She is safe, and we are going to have some tea. I’ll keep her here until you get home.”
My favorite description for what the local church can be is “seven moms.” The Church of the Seven Moms is comprised of people who belong to one another, are following Jesus together in the everyday stuff of life, and are living in proximity to each other with vulnerability and intimacy and mutual care.
I’m thankful my own two daughters are growing up with seven moms. In fact, I can think of no greater calling for myself than to be a kind of mom in God’s church. Because you don’t have to be a real mom to be a mom in God’s family. And you don’t have to be a kid to need a mom.
Created by Community, for Community
Humans were created for connection. Nature, Scripture, and, as we will see, our very bodies testify that this is true. What the great spiritual teachers tell us is that the interconnectedness of the universe flows from the interconnectedness of the Trinity. In short, humans were created for community because we were created by Community.
One of the words sometimes used to discuss the mysterious distinct-yet-one Community of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the Greek word perichoresis. Perichoresis describes a mutual indwelling, while also suggesting a sense of whirling movement—encircling and embracing and enclosing. Teachers, scholars, and mystics have long delighted in and argued over the similarity of perichoresis to the word for “circle dance” in classical Greek theatre. What I love about the image of a Divine Dance is its portrayal of the three Persons of the Trinity existing and acting in perfect partnership with one another, simultaneously submitting and leading, loving and honoring.
It’s obvious that no one word can fully capture God’s essence. Yet any description of God’s being and God’s mission must take into account the preeminence of community…or, even better, communion, which means “mutual participation,” and which begins to convey the love and presence and one-heartedness that flows through, between, and out of the Triune God.
The fingerprints of the painter, woodworker, or writer can be found on every piece she creates. This is true of the Triune Maker as well. God existed in communion even before time began: “In the beginning was the relationship.” One of the divine signatures on the fabric of creation is that it is woven together as a complex web of relationships. An essentially infinite number of connections exist among both living and nonliving created things. This is an ancient worldview, and a biblical one.
That the world is knit together is also, increasingly, the conclusion of many scientists. The word “conclusion” doesn’t quite work here actually, coming to us from the Latin concludere, meaning “to shut completely.” If anything, accepting the interconnectedness of creation is a beginning, a door that opens onto new answers and new questions, new insights and new mysteries, new freedoms and new responsibilities. Giuseppe Del Re, the late professor of theoretical chemistry at the University of Naples, summarized the repercussions for his own field this way: “Major conceptual advances in science now require that we recover a view of the universe in which every single thing or event is in fact related to everything else.”
Humans were created by the Community of the Trinity, and so we can only truly thrive when we are rooted in communities of true belonging. God said in Genesis 1, “Let us create man in our image.” The late Pope Francis said this was a clue to human fulfillment. We grow, mature, and are sanctified to the extent that we move away from isolation and into deeper communion with God and other people and all creatures. In this way, humans “make their own trinitarian dynamism which God implanted in them when they were created. Everything is connected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity.”
I’ve heard enough stories over the years of people who felt the palpable presence of Christ in the midst of their deepest isolation—locked in illness, in prison, or in despair—that I would never say God can’t satisfy our yearning for human connection. However, it’s also clear that humans need each other in ways that, by God’s own design, other humans were meant to fulfill. We were created for relationship with God and with other people.
There is a passage in John 17 that powerfully illustrates God’s intention that we live in intimate community both with one another and with God. Just before he was arrested Jesus offered up a prayer that reverberated backwards through history and forwards across God-only-knows how many centuries. First, Jesus prayed that in the difficult hours to come the Father would glorify, and be glorified by, the Son. Next, Jesus prayed for protection for his disciples, “so that they may be one as we are one.” Then Jesus extends his prayer to believers everywhere and in all times, praying that “all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (17:21-24)
This passage has been called the High Priestly Prayer. I like to think of it as the Family Blessing. Jesus expresses the love the members of God the Family have for one another. Jesus also articulates his will that his followers become a family too, not only for their own sake but as a signpost and vehicle of God’s love for all people. And when he says “May they also be in us,” Jesus extends an invitation: the perfect community of the Trinity invites us to join their Fellowship.
The heart of Jesus’s invitation to join God the Family is depicted beautifully in the painting above by Andrei Rublev, the fifteenth-century Russian iconographer. In The Trinity, three angels, symbolic of the Trinity, sit around a table and a common bowl, suggestive of the Eucharist. The fourth spot at the table seems to be empty. Some art historians believe that glue found on the icon was once used to hold a mirror. The mirror, as well as the hands of the angels, which can be interpreted as pointing to the open seat, indicate that God is beckoning us to sit at the divine table.
Incredible as it may sound, the Creator of the Universe requests the pleasure of our company. We are being invited into the life of love.
The Rise of the Nuns
Not just Nature and Scripture, but our own bodies testify that we were created for true belonging. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that social people recover from illness quicker than solitary people. Another study revealed that women with a large network of friends were four times more likely to survive breast cancer than those with few connections. Researchers have seen again and again that close relationships reduce the likelihood of heart attacks and dementia, and mitigate complications from strokes.
One of my favorite studies along these lines is the so-called Nun Study created by David Snowdon, an epidemiologist (now retired) at the University of Kentucky. The study followed nearly 700 nuns between the ages of 75 and 106, all of whom lived in convents in Minnesota or Wisconsin.
Snowdon’s team discovered that the nuns were 25 percent less likely to die in any given year than other American women their age. He concluded that the nuns’ longevity was at least partially attributed to two factors: their spirituality and their communities. “My sense is that profound faith, like a positive outlook, buffers the sorrows and tragedies that all of us experience,” Snowdown writes in Aging with Grace, his book on the Nun Study. “Evidence is now starting to accumulate from other studies that prayer and contemplation have a positive influence on long-term health and may even speed the healing process.”
About the nuns’ communities, he says:
For more than fifteen years now, I have witnessed the School Sisters of Notre Dame benefit from their ever-present network of support and love. The community not only stimulates their minds, celebrates their accomplishments, and shares their aspirations, but also encourages their silences, intimately understands their defeats, and nurtures them when their bodies fail them. From the day they enter the convent, they are members of a congregation that existed long before they were born. On the day they are laid to rest, they are celebrated by a community that will endure long after they are gone. How many of us are held so securely throughout life?
I believe we are all meant to be held that securely, though precious few of us are. No doubt in more ways than one, the School Sisters of Notre Dame point us to a profound truth: people are created to live in deep communion with God and with one another. Our bodies bear witness that we are made to know and be known. The purpose of community is not to delay death by a few years; it is to live while we are alive. Ultimately we don’t need longitudinal studies to be persuaded this is true; we need only to listen to the longing of our own hearts. If we already belong to a close-knit community, we know our need for it by its presence. If we don’t, we know our need for community by its absence.
And there are a lot of people for whom community feels absent.
The Loneliness Epidemic
In May 2018, the health insurance giant Cigna released the results of a massive survey that found the majority of American adults qualify as lonely. Loneliness has less to do with the number of people we come in contact with on any given day and more to do with whether we perceive that contact to be genuine, meaningful, helpful. Only around 53 percent of Americans have meaningful interactions on a daily basis—for example, an extended conversation with friends, or spending time with family. More than half the respondents said they sometimes or always feel like there is no one who knows them well. Loneliness cuts across demographics: young and old, rich and poor, married and not, women and men. Perhaps not surprisingly, single parents or guardians are among the most likely to be lonely. What was surprising—at least to me—was that the youngest generation was also the loneliest. In fact, every generation, from Generation Z (ages 18-22) to the Greatest Generation (ages 72 and above), was lonelier than the generation that came before it.
Mother Teresa, now known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, spent nearly seventy years caring for the poor, sick, and dying in India. She saw tremendous material suffering. But as awful as that suffering was, she believed that the worst pain a person could experience was feeling unloved and unwanted. This was, she said, the “greatest disease” in the West. “We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.”
The loneliness Mother Teresa described as a disease qualifies as an actual health epidemic. That’s according to a former U.S. Surgeon General. “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness,” Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
As a practicing physician, Murthy often found loneliness in the “background” of illness, “contributing to disease and making it harder for patients to cope and heal.” Loneliness and weak social connections increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, anxiety, and obesity. It also impairs our brain from making good decisions. Overall, Murthy said, loneliness reduces lifespan at a rate equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
“The Sad Reality of Modern Life”
Loneliness isn’t just an American epidemic either. In January 2018, the U.K. appointed its first-ever Minister of Loneliness, charged with tackling what Prime Minister Theresa May called “the sad reality of modern life.” This was prompted by a study which found that one out of every six British people describe themselves as often or always lonely.
Japan is also struggling to deal with the effects of widespread loneliness. So many elderly people there are dying alone and remaining undiscovered for long periods of time—an estimated 30,000 per year—that there is a word for it: kodokushi, or “lonely death.” There are companies whose grisly job it is to clean an apartment after a lonely death.
Another growing industry in Japan offers “rent-a-family” services. One firm, Family Romance, employs around 800 actors who play a range of roles. They fill in for dead or estranged family, impersonate boyfriends and girlfriends, fill out a wedding ceremony, scold people who believe they have something to atone for, and apologize to someone who believes he has been wronged. A second company specializes in providing rental families to neglected elders. From The New Yorker:
One couple hired a son to listen to the father’s hard luck stories. Their real son lived with them but refused to listen to the stories. The couple’s real grandson, moreover, was now past infancy, and the grandparents missed touching a baby’s skin. The price of a three-hour visit from a rental son and daughter-in-law, in possession of both an infant child and a high tolerance for unhappy stories, was eleven hundred dollars. Other clients included a young couple who rented substitute grandparents for their child, and a bachelor who rented a wife and daughter in order to experience having the kind of nuclear family he’d seen on TV.
Loneliness works not just at the individual level but at the group level too. Populations more likely to be marginalized from the mainstream are in greater danger of feeling isolated. For example, a homeless advocate in suburban Minneapolis says of the four years she herself was homeless: “It’s loneliness like you wouldn’t believe. The names people call you are horrid.”
Like the unhoused, immigrants and refugees are especially vulnerable to loneliness and its effects. The decision to leave one’s home country to find a new life in the United States is frequently a heartbreaking and dangerous one. Whether they live in the open or in the shadows of the undocumented, immigrants and refugees often have fewer friends and family, and face more barriers to accessing services and resources. They are sometimes grieving the loss of a job or career. There are cultural differences to navigate and outright discrimination too.
One final example of how loneliness works at the group level comes from longtime war correspondent Sebastian Junger.
In his book, Tribe, Junger explores how the breakdown of local community negatively affects, among others, soldiers returning home from deployment. When forecasting whether a soldier will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable a predictor as the severity of the trauma itself. “In other words, you could be mildly traumatized—on a par with, say, an ordinary rear-base deployment to Afghanistan—and experience long-term PTSD simply because of a lack of social support back home.”
Junger speculates that one reason veterans “miss” deadly combat is that when they were deployed they were living and working within an intimate unit. They saw the same people every day, often in close quarters. They were forced to look beyond their differences. And they were presented with opportunities to act selflessly on behalf of others. This was the kind of “close-knit group that humans evolved for,” Junger writes. But then the soldier returns home to a society where
most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good." Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society—and they’re nearly miraculous—the individualized lifestyles that these technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
When Junger pitched his theory to an anthropologist with extensive experience in war zones, she told Junger, “You’ll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society—that we are an antihuman society….We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”
“Who are my mother and my brothers?”
I’m willing to go there: I’m prepared to say that American society, or a great deal of it, is anti-human.
Our word health derives from the same root as the words whole and holy. The system of modern technological, economic, political, and cultural power—what Paul Kingsnorth calls The Machine—makes it harder to be whole, healthy, and holy, because it makes it harder to be human.
The Church, in contrast, is called to be pro-human. Following Jesus is a community-creating endeavor. But it is a radically new kind of community. It’s not the narrow tribalism condemned by Junger’s anthropologist. It cuts across racial, ethnic, and economic lines. It is no respecter of national boundaries or political parties.
And it expands even that most precious of institutions: the family unit.
In the strong-group culture of the ancient Hebrews, family was paramount. Life was incomplete until you were married with children; there wasn’t even a word in the language for “bachelor.” In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah was so distraught over not being able to bear a child, and had been teased so mercilessly for it, that she stopped eating. One prominent rabbi in the third-century A.D. said a question sure to be asked at the Judgement would be, “Did you engage in procreation?” In the ancient world, marriage was an opportunity to strengthen your clan by linking it to another clan. A valued member of one of these extended families was protected, with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and privileges. Someone on the outside—for example, a widow or orphan, a woman unable to produce a child, a person with a disease, or a slave—held a tenuous position in society at best.
Into all this stepped Jesus, who through words and deeds de-centered the natural family. He created a new group, a new family, one that transcended bloodlines, empowered women, blessed children, and brought into the very heart of the community those who had once been on the outside looking in.
Jesus subverted the “family values” of his day. In Mark 3, the crowd said to Jesus, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” Jesus responded scandalously: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
Peter said to Jesus in Mark 10, “We have left everything to follow you!” To which Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”
Here is the Church of the Seven Moms…or rather the Church of the Hundred Moms!
And in Luke 14, Jesus described the costs of discipleship this way:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate [renounce] father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
The word hate in that passage is not an emotional word but a word of intention. Jesus isn’t condemning the natural family outright. But he is clear that an inordinate love of family, like the love of money, is a barrier to discipleship.
The Gospel affirms the worth of the Self by dethroning the Self—a paradox. The same is true of the nuclear family, which some have turned into an idol, but which can fully flourish only when it’s not in the center. The nuclear family can’t be the nucleus. It is only by de-centering the natural family that it can really thrive, just as it is only in losing our life for the sake of Jesus that we can truly find it (Matthew 10:39).
The apostle Paul echoed Jesus’s description of the church as family, using family terminology for the church at least 280 times across thirteen epistles. Many of Paul’s church families met in actual family homes. The Australian theologian, Robert Banks, offers a fascinating look inside a typical Pauline house church. He described a community composed of about thirty people that could have included:
The craftsman in whose home they met, along with his wife, children, a couple male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative
Some tenants—including slaves and dependents—living in the same home in rented rooms
Family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church
A couple of slaves whose owners do not attend
Some freed slaves
A couple homeless people
A few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home
An enslaved prostitute
And more.
This little congregation is startlingly diverse—economically, racially, and socially. In that culture, women were basically second-class citizens. Slaves had no legal rights. Rich landowners had more privileges than the poor. Prostitutes lacked any social standing and were deprived of almost all protections by the state. But here they all were trying to figure out what it meant be new family, a community of true belonging.
God Sets the Lonely in Families
Created for communion, we’re all sending out relational sonar pulses, hoping to get a ping back from someone with whom we can share our hearts. Behind the stats of that huge Cigna survey—and other studies with similar findings—are tens of millions of Americans who feel like they’re getting no response. They feel alone and unknown. This must grieve the heart of our relational God.
Christians are called to preach not just with our words but with our lives, enfolding more and more people into caring communities of true belonging where they can be cared for—and can care for us—in the midst of life’s pain and joy, sorrows and celebrations, failures and successes, brokenness and healing.
In Psalm 68:5-6, King David praised God by singing:
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families,
he leads out the prisoners with singing…
God sets the lonely in families.
Life is too challenging to go through on our own. Life is also too rich and too interesting to keep to ourselves. Though we may not want to admit it, we need other people and they need us. We are made for connection. And yet there are powerful forces trying to pull us apart. The local church is meant to stand in contrast to these forces of alienation, a community of true belonging.
What I’ve seen in churches around the country is people turning back toward each other and back toward God. They are sharing their hearts with one another, sharing their lives, and sharing their resources. In so doing, they become living sanctuaries for the lonely, isolated, exposed, and overwhelmed.
Since Slow Church was released a decade ago, I’ve met countless Christians are becoming family for each other and for their neighbors. They are sharing their hearts with one another, a family for the lonely. They share life with one another, a community of stability in good times and bad. They share resources with one another, a community of abundance in the midst of a culture built around scarcity and greed.
Aurora Commons
Aurora Commons comes immediately to mind.
Once upon a time, the Aurora neighborhood in Seattle thrived. But when the Interstate came through in the 1960s, it devastated the community. Cut to present day and Aurora has a reputation city-wide for poverty, addiction, homelessness, prostitution, sex shops, and seedy hotels. There is a church in Aurora called Awake Church. By intention, nearly everyone who attends Awake Church actually lives in the Aurora neighborhood. When the church started trying to discern what God would have them do to love their neighbors, they felt called to create a sort of neighborhood living room. That’s how the Aurora Commons was born.
At the Aurora Commons, struggling neighbors can get out of the Seattle rain for a few hours, read a book by the fireplace, make a phone call, grab a bite to eat, and drink some tea or coffee. One of the most impactful things that happens at Aurora Commons is that people who are sometimes not even acknowledged as fully human—the homeless, addicts, and the mentally ill—can talk and be heard, can sit and be seen, can experience human touch without violence.
I remember the first time I visited the Aurora Commons. One of the staff people we were introduced to that day told us she had been up all night the night before, in the hospital with a homeless neighbor who was addicted to heroin and who had gone into labor. Mother and baby survived, but they both have an incredibly hard road ahead of them.
The staff person was understandably exhausted. I remember someone in our group said to her, “You are young, energetic, and educated. You could be doing almost any kind of work in Seattle. Why are you doing this work?” The staff person smiled a weary but sincere smile and said, “In my experience, Christians are the only ones crazy enough to do this kind of work.”
Foster the City
I also think about the organization my brother Philip cofounded called Foster the City. It started as a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area churches dedicated to finding a loving home for every child in the foster system. In addition to recruiting and training foster families from within the church, they train friends to help support the family and foster child. The network has now grown to include more than 300 churches, including many outside the Bay Area.
As Foster the City makes starkly clear in its literature, the “long-term effects of children growing up without a caring and stable family are tragic.” Nearly one-third of all California prison inmates spent time in the foster care system. Up to a third of youth become homeless after aging out of the foster care system, and more than 70 percent of girls who age out of the foster system will be pregnant by age 21. Sixty percent of the child sex trafficking victims recovered in a 2013 FBI raid were children from foster care.
But if the stakes are high, so is the opportunity: “What if the church became the place where abused and neglected children become beloved sons and daughters?” asks Foster the City. “If every church would raise up at least one foster family, we would see a waiting list of loving families ready to care for children, rather than a waiting list of children in need of a home. There is a church for every child.”
I love this vision. Because God sets the lonely in families.
My Own Community
The examples I’ve mentioned so far are programs run by churches and faith-based nonprofits. Those programs are vital. The churches and organizations I’ve described above are making new family happen. Churches in the U.K. that were among the first to recognize loneliness as a major issue in their parishes, are now on the front lines trying to address the need. They are training volunteers to reach lonely families, starting “befriending services” for isolated elders, hosting weekly lunches, and forming clubs based on shared interests.
Yet we can’t forget the quiet, largely invisible work of Christians who are weaving threads of relational care everyday in their homes and neighborhoods.
I think of Aaron and Michelle and the seven moms whose story opened this long essay.
I think of my friend Norm, a longtime pastor in British Columbia. He wanted to understand why people in his church were lonely. He discovered that the way we build our cities is keeping people apart, rather than bringing them together. So he became a passionate urbanist and neighborhood advocate, and now he is my Strong Towns colleague.
I think of our neighbors in the 11-cottage co-housing community behind our property, who watch over our youngest daughter as if she was their own niece or granddaughter.2
And I think of my parents, who adopted four boys—three out of the California foster care system—and always have a space at their table for anyone struggling, hungry, lonely, far-from-home, or brave enough to experience a holiday meal with a family with eight sons, their wives, and nine grandkids (so far). No one has taught me more about the family-expanding love of God.
My wife and I also feel fortunate that our kids are growing up in a community of adults who are as committed to their spiritual growth as we are. According to the Fuller Youth Institute, intergenerational relationships are one of the primary predictors that a teenager will develop a long-term faith that endures after high school. In particular, young people develop a “sticky faith” when they are surrounded by a community of at least five adults. (Here we see, again, the truth behind the Church of the Seven Moms.)
Alone and Unknown
I prayed for years that I would someday get to be the father of daughters. God’s two answers to those prayers are rambunctious, hilarious, creative, stubborn, exhausting, frustrating, and wonderful. A dad is one of the best things I get to be. But parenting is wild and messy. We were off-script by Day Two. Parenting has involved more poop and vomit and weird rashes than I expected, and those are nothing compared to the heartache, confusion, exasperation, sleepless nights, and regrets.
Loving your neighbor, like loving your own kids, is never as composed as a spread in The Kinfolk Table. Committing to faithful presence in your community brings its share of both joy and disappointment. Every time our capacity for love increases so too does our risk of being hurt. But what is the alternative? As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, “There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.” A perfectly sheltered heart, said Lewis, ultimately becomes a heart that is unbreakable, impenetrable, and perhaps even irredeemable.
Jesus’s story about the Good Samaritan, his command to “Love others as well as you love yourself” (Mark 12:31), and the example of his own life—loving his enemies, and choosing to die for them rather than fight back—are stark reminders: There’s no such thing as a limited liability neighbor.
But if the rending of the heart is real so too is the hope that God “heals the brokenhearted, and bandages their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). Some of God’s promised healing will happen in this life; most will happen in the next.
In the meantime, the Church of the Christ who said, “This is my body broken for you,” needs “moms” who can sit vulnerably with one another, with each other’s families, and with their neighbors—broken but beautiful, incomplete but expectant, ordinary yet holy.
I received permission to tell this story, though several minor details have been changed or kept vague to protect my friends’ identities.
When we moved to a new house a couple years ago, my wife and I helped host a block party. We met new friends, grilled hotdogs, and drank a neighbor’s homebrewed beer. We heard stories of how people ended up there, placed each other on our mental maps, and exchanged phone numbers. We also deputized one another to be emergency parents for the kids in the neighborhood. “Our youngest daughter is a runner,” my wife and I said about Julia, then two. “If you see her wandering around by herself, she escaped. You have our permission to scoop her up and bring her back home.”
I loved this John. Can identify with much of what you say. Appreciate you sharing.