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

find a friend? I didn’t care. I was desperate.
    It was awkward when I spilled my neediness to poor Caroline Parker, the college student who thought she was coming to my house to be interviewed for a babysitter position, not to be my therapist.
    It was awkward when we showed up at our new small group and shared the real story of our lives with complete strangers.
    But each time over the past three years that I have chosen to drop the facade of “I’m great, thanks,” and initiate conversations about how I’m really doing and what the other person really needs, God has handed me the most life-giving exchanges imaginable. In the wake of initiating, inviting the person to coffee, being willing to spill my guts, and asking the hard questions, real friendships began to form.
    We go first. We keep initiating.
    We see enough of Jesus’s life in the Gospels to know that He was an incredible initiator. He noticed people. He stopped for a conversation. He even invited Himself over to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner.
    I have been blessed to be able to do some work in Israel, and the thing that surprised me most is the tight radius within which most of Jesus’s ministry took place. Israel is a small country, roughly the size of New Jersey. Only five miles separate Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Communities were located intentionally so that people could return easily to the temple. We could sit on a boat in the Sea of Galilee and see the various places where Jesus spent most of His life. Most of the disciples lived just a few miles from each other, and most of their travels were day trips on foot.
    Jesus lived small and simply, doing life with those immediately around him, but those few people’s lives would affect the whole world. He prioritized proximity, His family, intimate meals, and fireside chats. That wasn’t revolutionary in biblical times. It’s just how people lived.
    And it mattered. People in small towns, living life together, was essential to the way the Church would grow and spread. The entire Church was birthed from a few uneducated fishermen and their friends, and it reached to the ends of the earth. And yes, someone had to take the gospel to the world. Paul and the apostles would travel and spread the good news, but all along the way, they settled into community contexts, staying with families, being invested in and supported by local churches.
    Community should, in its truest form, reflect aspects of who God is and how He loves. Which brings me to a question: Who has God put in your life—here and now and right under your nose—that you haven’t really connected with yet?
    Remember, the enemy wants to shut you down, make you afraid to initiate, cause you to not prioritize the people right in front of you. He wants us to live surrounded by people butnever deeply connected to them, so we don’t change, we don’t grow, we don’t even fully live—and we mostly end up stuck in self-pity about how we don’t have any friends when dozens of people in front of us certainly would welcome someone reaching out to them at the very least.
    In case you need help seeing the people in your life from this perspective, the following list will get you started. Granted, it isn’t exhaustive. But hopefully it will put words to what you need in the little team you are gathering around you—and help you notice the people who may already be filling key roles. These individuals may be of varying ages and cross your path in various ways, but the point is to look for people with certain qualities to play different roles in your life, not just seek out two to three people who are exactly like you and expect them to meet all your relational needs.
    A village of people meeting different needs and loving you in different ways provides a fuller, richer way to live. And these people probably exist somewhere around you already, maybe family members or neighbors or people at your church or your work? You just have to spot what gifts they