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

tight. This wasn’t a series of cliques; this was a community. A village. An entire town that knew everything about everyone—and was better off for it, no doubt.
    “You’re giving your son such a better life,” people in this country would say after I returned home with Cooper’s hand in mine. But I knew the truth. Yes, he would have a family and his needs would be met, but we had also stripped him of a vibrant, interdependent culture to bring him to the hyperindividualized U.S. of A. I was transplanting Cooper to the land of fast loneliness, praying that the four years he had in Rwanda would keep him tethered to Africa’s relationally saner way of life and committed to bring him back as often as we could afford.
    “You do everything alone in America,” our good friend in Rwanda, Pastor Charles Mugisha, always reminds me. “We [Rwandans] do everything together.”
    For better or worse, in the traditional village structure, the people all know your name.
    More sobering still: they all know your pain.
    But time and again, they throw in to help you survive, to help you get through this thing called life.
    Somewhere in the transition from hunting and gathering and cooking together to having our groceries delivered to our doorstep or the back of our car, we stopped needing each other. We don’t need each other to survive anymore. We don’t even need to borrow an egg.
    Or do we?
    Professor and author Brené Brown famously told the story of a group of women in a remote village in Africa who spent their late afternoons at the river’s edge, washing their families’ clothes by hand. [2] There in the sunlight, they would swap stories. They would ask questions. They would check in with each other. Most days, they would laugh so hard that they’d cry.
    These women were stuck in the throes of poverty, but you wouldn’t know it, aside from the tattered clothing and the obvious detail that they were forced to wash clothes in mucky waters.
    Well, sometime later, the entire village experienced a massive shift in its resourcefulness, after residents learned to plant and harvest crops. They could sell fruits and vegetables in a larger town nearby. With their new income, they could afforduniforms and send their kids to school. They could upgrade their modest huts to substantial, permanent structures. They could wire their lives with electricity. They could dig wells and finally have clean water. They could even buy a few modern conveniences, like cell phones, toaster ovens—and washing machines.
    Interestingly, once nearly every home in the village had its own washing machine, the prevalence of depression among the moms in that region rose sharply. What was going on here? The village was thriving, right? Look at all the stuff they had!
    The explanation may not be obvious to you and me, but it is to people like Pastor Mugisha, who was raised in a family of refugees following the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After coming to the States for the first time, he made this observation to me:
    “The more resources a person gets, the more walls he or she puts up. And the more lonely they become.”
    The Beginning and the End
     
    Let’s step back for just a minute to gain perspective. I like to start with the end in mind. If I know the goal, then I can build an effective strategy to reach it.
    So let’s go all the way to the very end, to heaven, where we will be surrounded by people who love God, people from every nation, every tribe. [3] We will be together forever, with no moredeath, division, comparison, fighting—no sin. Not just singing in some heavenly choir but living, working, relating, eating, loving, worshipping, enjoying God forever with a diverse group of people we recognize and who recognize us—forever.
    That’s the future, where we are headed.
    Now, let’s look back to the beginning to see how we got to where we are right now.
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    We can’t start any further back than Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning,