Fellowship – We are never alone

Before getting into the article for today, I would like to let everyone know that the email notice system used for the Monday-Wednesday-Friday emails has hit a hitch. We are unable to modify the email to include the new free resources downloading information and other key news and updates. (For those of you who follow this kind of thing, Mailchimp looks like the day I opened the account - empty. But it still sends the emails!) We are therefore migrating to a new system of sending emails on Fridays only. Please subscribe again to be sure you continue receiving notices. Thank you!

We know as Christians that we are never alone. We know that God is with us and will never leave us (Deuteronomy 31:6). But I think we ignore or at least minimize the other part of being never alone. We ignore being together, fellowship. We were made for fellowship, as from the foundations God said, ‘it is not good that the man should be alone,’ (Genesis 2:18) and he made a companion. Certainly, this is why we feel wrenched apart when we lose someone, or when we find that our loved ones suffer. We have this undeniable connection to one another. Perhaps this is love that ties us together.

But when we experience sickness ourselves or in our loved ones, when we experience grief, we often feel alone in it. Yes, we cry out to God in our misery, but we also have the need to physically be with others. We have the need to be with others to share our experience, our pain, our struggle and we need to hear the encouraging words or even the silence of ‘I am here for you and share in your pain.’ We have a need for fellowship, especially in the struggle.

Community response

Sometimes, we have been blessed by a community that rallies around us in these times. There is the group that schedules the meals to be delivered and the visits to check in. But when the tragedy has passed, why is it that the visits didn’t create intimacy? The visits stop. Alternately, we may have chronic or hidden illness. No one may know of the diabetes, the lupus, the ongoing cancer screenings, the miscarriage, the son addicted to drugs, the parent with Alzheimer’s. These hidden or on-going issues in us are also opportunities for the visits just to check-in. We as a church have too often failed people in coming alongside.

Shared experience builds community

We have all experienced sickness and grief. Whether a broken bone, headache, our pets dying as kids. We all know the struggle others are going through. Perhaps that is why we shy away from coming alongside, that we fear the pain it may dredge up.  Our experiences don’t take away from someone else’s. Just because my mother had cancer doesn’t mean that your mother’s cancer matters less; it means that I am united with you in Christ through that shared feeling of pain and sadness and the struggle to give it all to God. I lost my grandmother years ago, but it still hits me sometimes that I wish I could share something with her. And I get that pang again, but each time I do, it confirms that love never ends. Love never gives up. I love her though she is gone. And that gives me the compassion to see a glimpse of the pain of someone else’s fresh loss.

In letting others see our weaknesses, our illnesses, we can also invite greater community and unity as we also more deeply feel intimacy with Christ. We have all experienced something of this heavy sickness or loss, we need to share it. We feel the pain even if we aren’t able to put our finger on it because each member of the body of Christ belongs to all the others (Romans 12:5).

Stepping back from pain?

I was recently asked by a friend why I didn’t treat her as a pariah. Can you imagine someone perplexed because you chose to spend time with them? She is a widow and was when we met. What I didn’t know was that her friends didn’t contact her, her family had no idea what to say and didn’t attempt to contact her. This makes no sense to me. She doesn’t have leprosy or some other horrible contagious disease (that was in fact what my answer was!). She’s a widow, not a used shoe saleswoman. I think similar things happen when people undergo chemotherapy and lose hair. The outward and visible illness and loss make us freeze. People whisper about the lady in a head wrap, they whisper that Mr. X has chronic disease, but they don’t ask how things are going. My roommate’s father passed early in our sophomore year in school. She was an outgoing and popular gal, who still regularly hung out with long-time friends. Her fiancé and I were her only friends to attend the funeral.

Where were the friends, where was the community that was there every other (happy) day of her life? Is this a selfish desire to not feel pain? Is this the desire to ignore illness and pretend everything is okay? What is it that drives people to do nothing? It is true we are to expect pain and suffering in this life, but we do not have to do it on our own. Our momentary discomfort approaching someone in pain may mean the world to them.

An invitation to fellowship

When we don’t know what to say or do, it is an invitation to say, ‘I don’t know what to tell you other than I’m sorry to hear about X (diagnosis, child, friend, etc).’ And follow that with ‘I’m here, let’s meet for coffee on Tuesday.’ Then go and listen or distract with stories of your own, depending on what your friend needs. Just ask what they need. Be specific about an appointment, nothing is worse than ‘let’s get together,’ and never actually doing it. So we have an invitation, why don’t we share or invite others to share our pains and walk with each other?

Focus on hurting people

We need to stop focusing on ourselves, the worry of pulling up old hurts or saying the wrong thing or whatever we are thinking, because thinking of ourselves doing or being ends up meaning that we do nothing. We have to stop doing nothing and focus on the hurting people around us. Jesus approached the hurting, yet it seems to me that we shy away from them. We are each one of those hurting people. Don’t you recall how it would have felt if someone had just reached out, or stopped talking about themselves and listened to you? We don’t need more Bible lessons; we need more walking in the light together, sharing our pains and struggles as well as our joys and triumphs.