An Irreplaceable Gift

The Joy and Pain of Human Connection

Our church recently had the bitter-sweet experience of commissioning a dear family as our denomination’s next missionaries to Japan. It’s “sweet” because we love the Japanese people, and we long to see more of them find their life in Christ. The Frasers have spent the last two years preparing to go, and this commissioning service was the official “you’re prepared to go” ceremony.

So sometime this summer, once the visas have been secured and the flight arranged, we are going to be saying goodbye to them. Except, not really. We’ll still have a deep relationship of mutual support with them. But the relationship is going to change.

Now, I had kinda forgotten about that coming change, but the realization of it hit me deeper than I was expecting it to as we prayed for them at that commissioning service. Why? Because the gift that we have been able to enjoy these past couple of years has been real. The connection we have had has been life-giving. And I realized in that moment just how much I appreciated that connection and also how much that connection was going to change.

Now, I bring this event up, not for the sake of throwing a pity party for myself (even if those are rather fun), but rather because that event reminded me of a rather profound truth that I sometimes take for granted. Human connection is an irreplaceable gift from God, and the church is the best place in the world to find it. Let me tell you more about that.

The World is Changing Radically and Rapidly

Our world is rapidly accelerating in its push to move human relationships to the periphery. Remote work is the new normal, and we're all too content with the superficial connections we make on social media. Our beloved "third places" 1 are dwindling, and technology is taking over every aspect of our lives. All these changes are reshaping the way we connect with each other. We're more disconnected than ever, and the scary part is, we might not even realize just how bad it's gotten and how much worse it's going to get.

And to really understand this, I want you to hop in a time machine with me. We're going back to 2000 BC, to Nippur, Sumer - what's now modern-day Iraq. Picture this: we're sitting there, invisible to the world, and we hear someone playing an absolute banger of a song. But here's the thing. This guy didn't write the song. He didn't hear it from someone else. No, he read the musical notation from a tablet he just bought in town.

Now, This might not seem like a big deal to us, but back then? It was a game-changer. For the first time in human history, someone learned a song that someone else had written without having to be in their presence. It simultaneously provided a mechanism for the proliferation of music and a means to disconnect us from the one creating the music. But this was just the beginning…

Almost 4000 years later Thomas Edison invented the phonograph (1877). And for the first time in human history, you could preserve the audio of a song, copy it, sell it, and play it at your own convenience anywhere in the world. And like before, the proliferation of music was dramatic, while also completely doing away with the necessity of being in the presence of not only the original musician or one of her prodigies but even of any other person to enjoy it.

And since that day, we have experienced all sorts of technological advances that have continued to increase the creation of music while making it easier to experience it without a human connection. The radio (1895), LPs (1948), cassettes (1962), CD’s (1982), MP3’s and digital downloads (1990s), file sharing services like Napster and Limewire (1999), online streaming services like Spotify and Pandora (2000s), and now the use of artificial intelligence to assist in the creation and distribution of music (2010s-2020s) have all taken us to the point that we are today.

Each step of the way, we’ve democratized the opportunity to create music, which is obviously a good thing. More people can use their God-given abilities to produce the songs of their heart without needing to get-in-good with power brokers or taking out massive loans to fund their education, their promotion, or publication of their music. But with each step along that path of progress, we have also gone further down the path of needing less and less interaction with another human to experience music.

And looking ahead to the world of tomorrow, it is a certainty that in the not-too-distant future, there will be an artificial intelligence that will know our tastes, our interests, our experiences, and all of the things that make us enjoy certain songs more than others better than we do ourselves. 2 And this AI will be able to completely create custom songs for us depending on our moods which will touch us more deeply than any other song that a human could ever write themselves. As bonkers as that sounds, given how communal and “human” music is, it is something that will most certainly happen in the not-too-distant future.

Now, maybe the changes we have already experienced and the changes we will soon experience wouldn’t be all that striking if weren’t for the fact that most of our songs are about dealing with human relationships. We experience the heartbreaks, the joys, the confusions, and the whole range of emotions as we interact with each other, and we feel the need to sing about them. They help us make sense of our experiences with each other.

And not only that, but they bind us to other people who are experiencing something similar to us. If you’ve ever experienced an acapella sing-along at a concert or corporate worship at a camp or a large congregation, you know how special the shared connection with other humans is. We have “our” songs that we share with our lovers; and we have “our” songs that we sing at our birthdays, our weddings, our loved-ones’ funerals, our national celebrations, our sporting events, and the whole host of other communal activities that we take part in. There’s something deeply human in experiencing a song in the presence of another person. And yet, the trend that we are seeing is that human connection is becoming less needed in order to experience it.

Dissolving Human Dependence and Connection

Now, our experience of music is just one of many areas where we can easily see this trend of technological/societal progress and the dissolution of human connection taking place. I just realized it more the other day because my wife brought up the magnitude of those shifts. And after thanking her for giving me something really interesting to write about, I immediately was saddened at the implications of what she had just said. The need for human connection remains irreplaceable, and yet it is becoming easier to go through life without it, and as a result, harder to find it when we realize we need it.

We might fool ourselves into thinking, for a time, that we are “ok” without it because we have the cheap substitutes that technological progress has enabled, but after the mind-numbing effects of social media and our disintegrated world wear off, we feel the lack of what we’ve been missing. So we might be “living” but we aren’t fully “alive” if we aren’t living with real human connections.

And by the way, this isn’t just a problem for people in my generation. It’s a problem for all, especially for the younger ones. We are going to be eating the poisoned fruit of this social disintegration for decades to come.

I have three small children right now, and it’s obvious how the lack of human connection affects them. It’s pretty much immediate. You can tell when they have had a lot of screen time and minimal connection with me and Julia. Their moods shift. Their sense of who they are as people gets confused. Also, they yell at us when we turn it off… so there’s that… The point is, it’s easy to see the negative consequences, not just of too much screen time, but more importantly, the lack of human connection.

And unfortunately, the children aren’t alone. Other age groups (especially adolescents)3 are experiencing the same thing, but the harmful effects of the lack of human connection just aren’t as noticeable in the moment. These effects are more days, weeks, months, and years in the making. And the problem is that we often don’t realize just how much we are missing human connection until its absence has left some rather nasty scars.

And unfortunately, this situation is not so simple to resolve as just deciding that you need to get more human connection in your life. A lot of people that I’m talking to in my neighborhood are sensing what they are lacking, but they are noting how difficult it is to find those deep human connections in this world. It’d be one thing if all of the humans in our neighborhoods realized that what they’ve been doing hasn’t been working out for them and then decided to build a community with each other. But that isn’t happening. Instead, we see smatterings of individuals waking up to the reality of their situation, but they can’t seem to find many others willing to join them in building deep human connections.

It’s like there’s a centrifugal force pushing them away from each other. And even if they might be sensing their need for human connection, there’s no real centripetal force pulling them into community with other people. As a result, it’s becoming harder to find those who are also sensing the same need. They’re continuing to be pushed outward by technological progress too after all.

And if that wasn't bad enough, so many of the interpersonal skills that we depend on to build deep connections with each other are grown through the normal interactions that we have throughout our regular lives. Our siblings, our parents, our coaches, clerks, and others we have to put up with to do anything end up growing the skills needed to engage in real community. But the more that we don't need to put up with each other to enjoy the things we like to enjoy, the less our skills develop. So not only are we being driven further and further apart, but being driven apart is going to make it harder and harder for us to come back together. It’s kind of a mess...

Progress Needs to be Tied to Human Connection

Now, does this mean that I think we should go back to the stone age and remove all technology from our lives that is pushing us away from each other? Of course not! Nor would I say that we need to pump the brakes and stay where we are right now. We need to progress as a species. We need to proliferate.

If you know me at all you know that I’m a tech enthusiast. I’m writing this on a relatively new MacBook, using an AI grammar assistant, and even used an AI to help me brainstorm and organize some of my thoughts for this article. So no… I’m not saying that we should avoid using technology. The centrifugal force pushing us to grow is strong, and I believe it is needed in order for us to grow. There are too many problems in this world, after all, to stay still. We need to keep pressing outwards.

But that being said, if we don’t also have a centripetal force pulling us back into community with each other, we won’t have anything worth pressing outwards for. The human connection that we share gives meaning to our progress. It gives us the drive to solve the problems we need to solve.

We were created to live in community with each other. We were created to listen, to learn, and to love each other. We are not truly experiencing what it means to be human unless we are connecting with others who are like ourselves. A dog, a cat, or even an artificial intelligence may certainly make us feel certain things that we associate with the experience of human connection (happiness, joy, sadness, and the like), but they do not give us what only a human can give us.

Hopefully, you have experienced the joy of finding someone that you connect with, even if it has only happened for you in fleeting moments. It’s about as close as we get to magic in this life. You know it’s special when it happens. You anticipate where the other person is going. You feel their heart in your own. Your brains enmesh. You begin to see yourself in the other person. As you love and care for them, you find yourself loving and caring for yourself in the process. It’s magic.4

And yet, as “magic” as this experience is, it is profoundly normal for us. It’s what we were designed to do, and it's the primary reason why we have constructed the societies that we have. We would never have become what we are today, as a species, unless we deeply connected ourselves with our fellow men and women. And we most certainly will not grow into the best versions of ourselves unless we commit to connecting with each other in community. We won’t seek to cure any of the great ills plaguing society unless we have someone we long to save from them. Our human connections encourage us to grow.

But the point that I am trying desperately to sound the alarm on in this post is that with how far we have come, we are experiencing an overwhelming force pulling us away from each other. The music example I gave earlier is just one of many areas where we can see this taking place. And for it to be happening with music, which has historically primarily served the purpose of drawing us together, should have your alarm bells ringing too. The more we progress outward, the stronger the force pushing us apart seems to be getting. And this progress, without an even stronger centripetal force, will only cause us to drift farther apart from the very thing that caused us to progress in the first place.

A Hotbed for Connection

Now, it's probably no surprise to you that I believe the church is the best answer to the problem I’ve just set before you. I’d probably be a pretty bad pastor if I thought otherwise. But maybe something that you don’t know is that I am personally experiencing what I’m trying to impart to you. I’m experiencing the church as a place that’s naturally fostering connections and building community. It’s a place where I get to share my joys, my sorrows, my hopes, and my fears. It’s a place where I get to be myself and know that I am loved and accepted just as I am. And the story I shared about the Frasers is just one example of the fruit that it is producing in me. I’m fairly regularly getting to experience the love of community within the church.

Now, that is not to say that it is always that way. I, like probably many of you, have experienced the church in quite the opposite way at times. I’ve gone to church, and have looked forward to getting out of it as soon as possible. It has felt toxic for me to be involved in it (even while working for it). So if what I just said about the church rings a bit hollow to you, I get it. It has for me too at times.

But here’s what I’d say to that. Those experiences have less to do with what the church is at its core and more with how it can get distorted from its core. When the church becomes focused on gathering people around a particular leader, a particular history, a particular vision, or some other particular “thing,” that particular thing’s faults end up shaping it more than the original design does.

But thankfully, the church has a built-in corrective (provided she makes use of it). If a congregation is rooted in Jesus Christ, she is continually being drawn back to imitate someone whose mission is grander than any human could dream of and whose modesty transcends any human possibility. He can capture our affection and attention more than any other entity - he’s truly transcendent and unknowable. And yet, he humbled himself so that we might know him. He didn’t set himself above us but lowered himself beneath us. And if the church imitates him, those qualities will naturally grow in it.

It will be oriented around a mission that is greater than any human leader can dream of. It won’t get easily hijacked by the movements of the day but will instead speak to the greater picture that all of them are catching a narrow glimpse of. It will be greater than any particular movement or party because its mission will be rooted in the very mission of the God who created all things and is invested in their continued fruitful progress.

And while its mission will be grand, it will seek to carry it out in humility. It will be rooted in the truth that no one belongs within God’s mission because they have paid their dues, earned their place, or proven their loyalty (which is the norm for most movements and institutions today) but rather because Christ has formed his community with them. One of the central truths (if not the most central truth) within Christianity is that you don’t earn your place in this community; you receive it as a gift. And provided the church has that understanding at its core, it has a powerful corrective to rid itself of the various power dynamics that plague most earthly communities. To be great in the kingdom of God is to reject self-aggrandizement and to take on humility.

Now again, the church isn’t perfect, but let me put it in the terms I’ve been using here so far. If a church is rooted in Christ, its members are able to experience the joy of both the centrifugal force of Christ’s mission that pushes humanity to become greater than they are and the centripetal force of Christ’s humility that draws them back into a common understanding of themselves as ones who all have need of God’s grace. That is a powerful combination to build a real community that, quite frankly, no other entity in this world can match. The church, provided it is rooted in this centrifugal and centripetal Christ, can be a hotbed of healthy human connection that leads to something even greater. And that is an incredible gift that it can offer to a world that is going to need it more and more in the coming days. It’s a gift that I am finding to be quite irreplaceable and one that I hope you are enjoying or will come to enjoy as well.

NOTES

1 “third places” is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe churches, clubs, cafes, parks, and other places where people gather together on equal footing to discuss ideas and form communities with each other. This dynamic is different than how people interact with each other in the home (first places) and workplace (second places), and is core to the formation and preservation of society.

2 Some would say that that we already have elements of this right now with the algorithms that Spotify, Amazon music, and others are using. But I believe we are still a good way off from what I am talking about here.

3 There’s some fascinating (or deeply disturbing) research being done right now by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch on the mental health crisis in our adolescent population. They’re looking primarily at the connection of social media and smartphone usage to adolescent mental/emotional health. And surprise surprise, it turns out that they are largely having a disastrous effect. Go ahead of follow the link below and dive into what they’re finding. But just know that they are far from the only ones that are coming to the conclusion that the lack of authentic social connection is having a detrimental effect on adolescents. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report

4 As “magic” as it is, it is also being understood scientifically more and more as we study the brain. It turns out that this “magic” can be observed as our brain waves sync up with and even anticipate where our conversation partners’ brains are going. For a fascinating read on this topic, check out “Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact” by Lydia Denworth in Scientific American, published July 1st.