One Another Series

Flying sure ain’t what it used to be … amen? You have to get to the airport three hours before your flight … go through the TSA checkpoint and get scanned … and then you have to wait and hope that your flight isn’t delayed … or worse, canceled. But we go through all this because of the people waiting for us at the other end, amen? You walk down the hallway, you turn the corner into the waiting area, and there they are … and there’s that instant recognition and joy and all the rigors of the trip just fade into the background.

Or maybe we’re the ones waiting in the airport … checking the flights on the schedule board … waiting to catch that first glimpse of our loved one or loved ones … and there is that sense of … well … connection the second you see each other.

We are more connected that any other generation in the history of the world … cell phones, skype, zoom, e-mail, the internet, countless social media aps. My daughter can send me a picture from Miami Springs, Florida, while she is talking to me on the phone over 700 miles away, and I’ll get it on my phone or laptop in less time than it took for me to say that, amen? It’s one thing to talk to her or see her on the phone and I am grateful for the technology that we have today … but it doesn’t compare to that moment when I see her and we get to spend some actual “face” time with her.

There is something deep within all of us that craves human connection, which is why social media is so popular and has become so massive. Charles Colson notes that the age of personal computers has pushed individualism to a new level. Rather than connecting with people face to face, we’re doing it more and more electronically. “In an increasingly impersonal world,” says media theorist Steven Johnson, “people really want to connect with one another” (Time. “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.” June 5, 2009).

Our need, our sense of “connection” is so strong and runs so deep that it even hopes to transcend life. When a person dies, we hope and we pray that we will one day see them again and never be separated from them ever again by death. We hold on to their memories and we carry them in our hearts but we long for the day when we will no longer need to hold on to their memories because we will be with them and they will be with us forever and ever … which is why we worry about the state of their soul or their salvation or our own, amen?

I believe that our desire … our need … for “connection” is divine and God-given. When God created the universe, He wasn’t lonely. He wasn’t lacking but He wanted to share His marvelous creation with someone who could appreciate it and enjoy it as much as He did … and so He created us. “Us.” He didn’t create just one of us. He created two … Adam and Eve … so that they could share the experience of sharing life and being together just as He wanted to share life and be together with us … and He told us to go make more people so that we could share life and love … so that we could comfort each other … help each other … so that we wouldn’t be all alone. “Two are better than one,” wrote Solomon, “because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

We are hard-wired for connection. One of the most severe forms of punishment is solitary confinement. “Studies have shown that solitary confinement can cause prisoners to develop mental health problems and exacerbate existing psychological issues. One of the main reasons for this is that those in solitary confinement can't enjoy human interaction and communication, which are important in maintaining good mental health” (justiceaction.org.au/solitary-confinement). How long can we go without human contact or limited human contact? It varies from person to person. "Some people have an immediate, profoundly negative reaction to it," says Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the impact of solitary confinement on inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in California where prisoners confined to solitary confinement are held in cells little larger than a double bed. There are no windows. “The prisoners get 90 minutes of exercise a day. The rest of the time is spent staring at the steel door and the smooth concrete walls - or the television” (Kremer, W., & Hammond, C. “How Do People Survive Solitary Confinement? BBC World Service, June 13, 2013; www.bbc.com/news/magazine).