Not Good for Man(kind) to Be Alone

Even introverts need people. I smiled so much on Saturday my face got tired.

Last Saturday morning was the Magnolia Summerfest parade. This parade was our first so I didn't really know what to expect from the entire event. I decided to volunteer in order to get to know people by working alongside them. I thought that "trash picker upper" sounded like an easy job.

I was voluntold that I would be, not "trash picker upper" or "horse cleaner after," but Parade Staging Manager. The word is that everyone loves a parade, except for the Staging Manager. (I think I skipped class the day that we talked about helping organize a parade in seminary. That's another story.)

What a clown!

There were great crowds of people lining the streets. Of all of the time we have spent going to community events, nothing no nothing compared to this. People stopped all of the important things in their lives to come out and see clowns on oversized tricycles and grown men dressed as pirates. (Not that there is anything wrong with that :) Candy was thrown to the kids in abundance and parents all got to take a break from trying to be their children's entertainers for an hour.

Thankfully, no children were Shanghaied...this year.

About the time that the large marching band went through and I finally started to figure out what I was doing, I saw something in the crowds that encouraged me: people didn't just come for the clowns and the pirates, they came to be together. The parade entries were a good excuse.

In a neighborhood where so many people are "alone together," busy being social but oftentimes disconnected from heart-friendships, a parade is a safe way to share experiences but not share ourselves.

But just the fact that people came at all shows me that we all know something that we may not want to admit: we need real relationships. We need to be able to stop telling the world that we have it all together and to be able to be safe in a friendship defined by (real) forgiveness and (committed) acceptance.

The problem is that we know "us" too well. We know that we will not receive grace from another because we know we don't give grace. We know that we will have to be changed to be close to another person and we treasure that sin more than the possible relationship. We know that the vulnerability that is necessary to have a heart-friendship is costly.

I didn't make a hundred new friends on Saturday. I may have made a significant connection with 3 people. Maybe. But, what encourages me is that people still have a longing for real community within the neighborhood. The people, each one made in God's image, who gathered around a parade on Saturday are still longing for relationship.

The only way that longing will ever be filled is if Jesus transforms our fearful and self-righteous hearts and remakes us into people who come together for a different reason: because we are loved too much to (dangerously) stay safely away from real relationship with Jesus and one another.

We need to smile more deeply than we are willing to, but we will never do that alone.