Don’t ever think that you don’t need anyone else, that you are just fine on your own – because it’s simply not true. You were created differently than that.

A while ago, my brother in law was sitting in my house, playing a game on his iPod touch when he got an urgent call from his wife.

“HELP!”

I don’t think she needed to use the phone, I’m sure we would have heard her even without it – and she wasn’t even at our house.

Like the dutiful husband he tries to be, he finished his game and sauntered home.

Actually, that’s not true. He didn’t finish the game and he ran home, but that’s beside the point.

A short while later, he was back in my living room, playing his game and reporting to me in graphic detail exactly what had been in his son’s diaper… and down his legs… and up his back… I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

What he was a little perplexed about though was why his wife had called him at all. He’d gone over and had maybe held a towel or something, but he really hadn’t actually DONE anything to help at all, he hadn’t needed to. Yet his wife was very grateful for his ‘help’.

“Why? Why did she feel she ‘needed’ me when she didn’t actually NEED me to do anything?” he asked.

“Simple.” I said, “Because we were built for community. We were built to not go through life alone.

Actually, ‘doing’ something, was not your role, not what you were needed for. Yours was more of an emotional role. A form of moral support.

Sure, she could have done the same without you but your simple presence there brought completeness to her and gave her the feeling of not facing it alone. You made the task easier, turning it into something she could cope with simply by being there.

I don’t like sleeping in the house alone. Every creak of the walls and every whistle of wind through the holes in the roof makes me jump and quake in fear. Yet having my year-old baby in the house calms my fears and completely changes how I feel.

Why? Because, even though she could do nothing to save me from the boogie-man, just having her there means I’m not alone and thus changes how I feel completely – because we were not made to be alone.

There is, strangely, strength and peace to be gained simply from not being alone.

We need other people. We all do. It’s who we are.”

In the Bible, in Genesis 2, we see that God had created Adam and had made him to need community. After all, God is a communal being by his very form, being three people in one. After looking through all of creation, he found nothing that could give Adam the community he needed, and it is recorded that God himself said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Adam NEEDED other people, even though he had a perfect relationship with God, by his very nature he needed someone else to share life with.

We often try to convince ourselves that we can ‘go it alone’ or that bottling things up inside and ‘bravely’ struggling on without sharing our trials is the noble and courageous thing to do – but that’s total and utter nonsense.

You had the need for community, for sharing experiences, hard-wired into you from the moment you were conceived. To try to ignore that is to try to ignore who you are.

You need other people…. and that’s all there is to it.