Free Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World by Jennie Allen

your nose.
    The most common explanation I hear from people about why they don’t have friends is they are too busy. But what if, instead of scheduling occasional lunch dates or starting some new monthly club, you looked around at what you already are doing and who you already are with?
    My sister-in-law Ashley recently went on a four-day silent retreat, and while I suspected she was going to hate the experience, in an act of impressive self-restraint I held my tongue until she returned. “Well, what did you think?” I asked as we settled in on my back porch to analyze it all.
    “It was…silent,” Ashley said. “And also, pure torture.”
    “I knew it!” I beamed. “I knew that’s how you’d feel.”
    We are both extroverts, and while I’ve been on plenty of silent retreats alone to write or to pray, trying to survive in silence with real live human beings around would be agonizing at best. I can do the “alone thing,” no problem. It’s just that when I’m supposed to behave as if I’m alone when there are perfectly lovely people around, I just can’t relax.
    We are meant to short-circuit when we are surrounded by people we aren’t engaging with. It’s supposed to make us feel tortured inside when we act alone in the context of perfectly good people we could be hanging out with and loving well. We should come away absolutely hating any experience thatby design distances us from other human beings instead of helping us to draw near to each other. And yet far too many of us have adopted this as a lifestyle. We go through life barely noticing the people God has put right in our paths, insisting that we’re all alone in the world, that nobody cares, and that we’re doing just fine on our own. The truth is this: we are meant to be emotionally close to the people we are physically close to.
    Be close to those we’re close to—that’s my goal for us. And it’s admittedly a stretch goal. Because most of us choose to hold on to friends from past residences and past lives, believing that since nobody who is right here in front of us will ever measure up to those precious people, why bother making new friends?
    Or we say we are too busy to build new relationships, when we are actually around people that could be more than acquaintances if we invited them into our lives.
    Or we center every moment of every day on our nuclear family members so that we never even allow ourselves to dream about having caring, intimate, non-family friends.
    Or we believe we need to have absolutely everything in common with people and be in the same life stage before we even consider they could become close friends.
    Or we move constantly, we never settle down, and we are always looking for the next adventure, next roommate, nextchurch, next job. We don’t truly commit to a place and a handful of people. If you are trying to make friendship an addendum to your busy schedule, it will never work.
    You have to build it as you’re going. Relationships should arise out of your everyday places and your everyday activities.
    Proximity is a starting place for intimacy.
    Yes, I have deep sister-friends spread all over the country, but those relationships will always take more effort. It’s hard to “run a casserole over” when the world falls apart for one of them. Many of my long-distance friends are forever friends to me, and I have a handful that I will never let go as long as I live. But we all need a network of regular people who are present in our daily lives.
    Hebrews commands us to consistently make time together: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” [4] The writer is speaking here of the church, which we will discuss in greater detail later, but when this exhortation was written, “church” was defined as a group of people, not a building for a