We’re lonelier than ever. And the way we’re doing friendship isn’t solving the problem.

A recent Harvard study showed that 36% of Americans experience extreme loneliness. According to the study, the Pandemic revealed that our social fabric is full of holes. People are falling through the cracks.

The study also found that a higher number of “friends” did not inherently reduce this loneliness.
Instead, if you dig into the study, researchers found that the key to health and happiness was having people in your life who are committed to living with you for the rest of your life.

We need lived-in community, and we need to know that we’ll have that community tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade, until we die.

It’s obvious how Christian marriage attempts to solve that problem. And still, plenty of married people struggle with loneliness.

But I want to particularly focus on single Christians. If the solution to loneliness is lived-in, lifelong human family, but we’re single for now and might be single for the rest of our lives, does that mean we’re just screwed. Does that mean we just have to accept loneliness?

No! Thankfully not. But it is true that what we’re doing isn’t working.

The revolving door of roommates and church small groups isn’t working. It just leads to heartbreak and weariness. Many just give up and resolve that it’s less painful to just be alone.

What is the solution? In the early Church, single Christians committed to a vocation of singleness for the sake of kingdom work for a lifetime. They lived with other vocational singles, as a family. They used their availability in singleness to serve the poor and needy together. And they stuck around in the same city, the same neighborhood, for their entire lives. And they weren’t lonely.

What if Christians today gave that time-tested solution a try? What if we were afraid to be weird in order to escape loneliness?

Watch the video at https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3BP011JTCK/