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

once-a-week gathering. The Church was a local group of interdependent people who loved God and each other. They did everything together. They ate together, prayed together, encouraged each other, and sold goods so that they could take care of each other. [5]
    To build a lifestyle in which we are consistently present for one another like this, we need to do three key things.
    STEP 1: Notice Who Is Already Right in Front of You
    Consider the people who you see regularly at your school or your church or your job or your neighborhood or a kid’s sports team or a book club. Could it be that there are close friendships waiting for you there?
    Right now, get a blank piece of paper and draw scattered circles for each of the activities and venues you frequent over the course of a given week. Label each circle with the location or activity. Next to each circle, write the names of people you interact with in each place. Now think about each of those people in terms of potential friendships.
    Who do you enjoy being around?
    Who do you share some things in common with?
    Who seems genuinely interested in you?
    Go back over your list of acquaintances and highlight ten names of people you could see yourself investing in on a deeper level. Pray over those ten highlighted names, and ask God to help you decide on the three to five people to pursue deep relationships with. Who are those people? Circle each name with a red pen.
    Your map might look something like the example below.

    The truth of my relational situation when I moved to Dallas was that I knew some friends. The problem was that, while those people all lived in Dallas, few of them lived within a half-hour drive of our new home. As is the case with Austin (and hundreds of other metropolises throughout our country), Dallas is an urban sprawl made up of countless bedroom communities, subdivisions, neighborhoods, and parts of town, each connected to the next by tangled spaghetti mounds of interstates and freeways. To drive from one side of the city to the other takes planning, strategy, and time. Had I settled for simply reconnecting with all the people I already knew, I would have been replicating the terrible reality I’d fallen into in Austin: namely, living so far away from my people that they never felt like my people at all. If a friend—or I—was having a meltdown on an average Tuesday night, we needed to be able to get to each other—fast.
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    I realized I had to quit viewing everyone in my new neighborhood and at my kids’ schools, church, and Conner’s football games as nameless strangers. I needed to start viewing them as friends in the making.
    So, that’s step 1 for both you and me: Start seeing the people right in front of us as friends—or potential friends, at least.
    This next part is where things get a little awkward.
    STEP 2: Put Yourself Out There
    It’s rare that someone will take the initiative in friendship, so quit waiting for that to happen. Everybody is busy, and few people are prioritizing deep connection. In other words, plan to go first.
    Connection takes stepping out and being intentional again and again. If you’re thinking, I’ve done that for so long, and nobody is reciprocating, let me gently encourage you to be sad for exactly one minute and then to get over it and own that role. You will never have friends unless you are willing to consistently initiate. Be the one who reaches out. Initiate and initiate again. You can’t expect to have friends unless you get good at this. Even though it’s frustrating. Even though it’s awkward.
    It will almost always be awkward.
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    It was awkward when I reached out to that camp counselor after two and a half decades, not to thank her for being a positive influence during my teen years, but to ask her to be friends. I imagined her sitting there at the coffee shop across from me thinking, How desperate must this poor woman be, to have to dig all the way down to her teenage relationships to