I got word today of a friend who has been feeling loney lately and is in need of encouragement. The news came by way of an email that was sent to a bunch of people in order to coordinate something we could all do for her. My first reaction to the email was pure excitment about doing something nice for this friend. But then I got to thinking about how it seems to me that so many women I know in this phase of life (married with career or children or both) deal with lonliness at some point. I know I sure have and often still do. Despite my joy in taking part in blessing my friend, I just couldnt help but to continue to be burdened by this idea that so many women out there are loney. It makes sense, we are home with the kids or at work with co-workers who are not neccesarily people we chose to have in our lives. We have all the duties of wife and motherhood to attend to and little time for ourselves. I have often written off my own stuggles with lonliness and isolation as aspects of this season of life that are inevitable and then felt the pressure to just suck it up and deal with it. However, recent speculation into this issue has allowed me to see things a little deeper. This issue seems to be prevelent in our culture at large. We saw "Knocked Up" this weekend and we laughed so hard at how much we identified with the highly dysfunctional married couple, the sister and her husband. He and she were both so obviously lonley. The wife is sad and bitter and although what she really wants is to have her husband around, she drives him away with her neurotic behavior that stems from her bitterness (very viscious circle). The husband is so desperate for companionship that he pretends he's leaving the house for work and instead attends male bonding rituals like a fantasy baseball draft. Desperate. Familiar, though to a lesser extent (let's hope so!!). But my personal identification with these characters and the email I got this morning are proof that we as Believers are no more immune to this than anyone else. This, to me, is very sad and an indication that we as a subcluture of christians are missing something huge that God intended for us as a "church". That something missing is a real understanding and experience of deep, intimate community. The kind we see in the church in Acts. Prayer, in the book of acts, seems to me to be primarily coorporate not individual. Everybody shared everything. Individualism has got the best of us here. It is so deeply engrained in us as Westerners, particularly as Americans, we seem to barely be able to scratch the surface of true community. I believe this is why so many of us are lonley. Yes, this stage in life is demanding but I no longer see lonliness as inevitable for me. I believe that if we exerienced more than just church picnics and BBQ's and once a week Bible Studies where everyone shares prayer requests quickly at the end and promises to pray for you during the week (not that that is bad), that we might not feel like we are in our own world so often. If interactions between friends were challenged to a place of true vulnerability and friendships valued as essential to our spiritual vitality I believe a connectedness and intamacy unlike what is most common would develop and we would refreshed, energized and encouraged rahter than dry, weary and lonely. I am very fortunate to have had a taste of this kind of community in my life. A group of friends from college that are commited to being real and spiritually intimate with one another provide this for me. However, I am not satisfied with just that in my life. These friends are all over the place and it is rare we are able to meet in person. I would like to have this kind of connectedness with every community of believers I encounter. At times I think that my hopes are unattainable, that the way we are in this culture is too set in stone and that we just won't experience what the people of the early church did to any great extent until we are all united with Christ in heaven. But that's me being timid and lazy and unwilling to try and hope for fear of being disappointed.