Breaking the Curse of Isolation

Sometimes I struggle to love my neighbors. Today's society makes it very easy to avoid other people and live heads down on our phones and laptops. Now, if one is careful, community, if organized, can be found on Threads, Bluesky, YouTube, and Reddit groups. But too often, the screens are merely a reflection of the person's face. Time is spent on work projects, video games, and mindlessly doom-scrolling. These are not acts of community but of isolation and there is too much isolation today.

I recently went on a pastoral visit, and on my way, I was asked by another resident to come and visit. Meeting someone outside my community, listening to their story and praying over them was awesome. Inviting them to our community and letting them know that they are not alone is central to being a good neighbor.

When we love our neighbor, we love God. Why? Each of us is created, and crafted as unique people and is worthy of love if only for that reason alone, that we exist. But our current culture rewards self-criticism, isolation, maximum productivity, and self-centeredness. The fruits have been loneliness, chemical dependency, violence, and self-harm.

But there is a solution, and it is found in the community. We are not created to live alone. We must leave our homes, offices, and game rooms and wander our neighborhoods. We need to release ourselves from the guilt of working on a car with a neighbor or volunteering at the senior center.

My challenge for you is to meet one new person this week. Engage outside and see if your mood doesn't improve, your loneliness doesn't lift and hope arrives. Because faith, love, hope, and joy are found in community and not isolation.

Comments

It's the Simple Acts of Kindness

I remember watching members of the evangelism team at a local megachurch wandering the streets of Downtown Minneapolis, handing out tracts and praying with people in an attempt to lead them to Christ. My kids attended Sunday School there because the Sunday School at my home church wasn’t very good at this point, so I was a regular at their Sunday evening services. I noticed that I never saw people who had prayed with this team in the auditorium. Instead, I met a lot of folks whose lives had been changed through the food pantry ministry, the chemical dependency clinic, their children’s participation in the private school on campus, and the bookstore. All of these spaces provided acts of signs and wonders in these people's lives that they could expressly point to, and that led to them changing their lives in the way God was calling them to. Just preaching the word isn’t enough. It must be follo...

Our World Needs to Move Beyond Two Choices!

By Carol Meile I have a bee in my bonnet. Lately, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the plague of binary thinking that pervades our culture. It is literally tearing it apart. We have good and bad, light and dark, red and blue, MAGA and progressive. All these binary dualities of thought and to what end? We haven’t solved any of the major issues in our country. In fact, we have used our binary culture to kick the can down the road to the point of garbage being in the streets, homeless people in mass encampments, and the poor, regardless of location, largely forgotten, and we treat migrants inhumanely. This has to stop. There are millions of color combinations hundreds of economic and political approaches, a country can do things other than erect walls at its border, and we house and feed everyone on Earth. All of this is doable. We have the technology. What we don’t have in this country is any form of will. A pervasive laziness has taken over society. We have a...

Don't Forget God...

Pictures and poem by Carol Meile We have forgotten, and it saddens me. We have forgotten the simplicity of the Gospel message in America. We now worship wealth, power, sex, and money as gods. And the price we have paid as a society is horrible. People sleep on the streets, children hunger, the elderly are forgotten, the poor are vilified, and migrants are treated worse than common trash. We have lost our humanity and have placed ourselves before others. People are asking theologians and pastors to reimagine the Gospel around these values of rugged individualism, personal responsibility, greed, power, and competition. This is a rubicon that many pastors will not cross. In the Gospel of Luke, the writer speaks in song of God's faithfulness from generation to generation. He writes about how the proud are scattered in their thoughts, the powerful are brought down from their thrones, and the hungry are filled with good things, while the rich are sent away. (L...

Seeking Salvation : Christianity, Faith, Methodism

Search This Blog