On Being Known

I will never forget Maie Sullivan. Adopted from an orphanage that was bombed by Russians two days later. Fled with her adopted family from Estonia to Sweden, where Nazi planes tried to bomb the train they were on. Grew up with her family in an insane asylum where her father worked as a doctor. And somehow she ended up in Bozeman, Montana, with her beloved Gary. I was her final pastor who had the privilege of helping her finish her race.

Maie died in her eighties, in a small room that smelled like lotion, with someone from our church holding her hand. One hospice nurse who had cared for her twenty years earlier, when she had pancreatic cancer, was there with her. God had healed her then, and twenty years later, the nurse, now retired and a member of our church, was there holding her hand again. Maie's husband had been gone for over a decade, from cancer. Her daughter, the one person you would have expected to carry her through those last years, had died a few years before her of glioblastoma. By any measure of loneliness, Maie should have died alone. She did not.

It was a slow and painful death. We prayed for death to come. But death would not come, and as a result, I watched it happen, week after week, in the unglamorous way that most real love happens. The mail was picked up daily. Drivers appeared to take her to appointments. Friends had hard conversations with her that did not always go well. An elder of our church sorted out her finances. Meals appeared on a regular basis. Long-time friends who had been in Bible study for years took turns sitting with her when the pain made sleep impossible. Students or retired friends would mow her lawn.

Near the end, the hospice nurses started to comment on it. They had seen a great many people die. They had not seen this many people show up. They eventually asked us to stop sending people. The problem was that we were not sending people. There was no program or prayer chain behind it. It was just people who had promised, a long time ago, to belong to each other, and who kept the promise long after it stopped being convenient.

A young man in our city has just under nine hundred followers. His feed is not as embarrassing as some are. There are no cries for help, no obvious wreckage or pictures he will hopefully one day regret. It is just a light-hearted social media feed — enjoying a concert one weekend. A picture of the summit. Vacation with friends. And the occasional opinion on the latest news. His interactions with friends are easy and kind. Nine hundred people know something about him. Nine hundred people have, in some technical sense, chosen to keep up with his life. And at two in the morning, when the thing he cannot say out loud finally gets too heavy to carry silently, there is no one he can call. Not because the nine hundred are cruel. Because none of them agreed to be woken up. Attention is not the same as belonging, and he has an abundance of one and almost none of the other.

Go back to the beginning, when everything God had made he had already called good. All creation had in fact been declared good until man stood alone in the garden. And then, in a statement that interrupted the cadence of "good," God declared one thing "not good." That sentence was spoken before sin entered the world. Being alone was a problem within a world without sin and brokenness.

Our need for others is not a wound from the fall to be managed until glory. It is a design feature, stamped into us by a God who is himself, eternally and joyfully, not alone. We were made in the image of a Father, Son, and Spirit who have never for one moment existed in isolation from one another. A being made in that image was never going to flourish disconnected from other beings.

We all feel this ache. Let's be willing to admit how empty the room feels as we sit next to each other. Our supercharged, individualized, and curated lives have left us empty. And so, let's expose the false comforts we have accepted in place of real belonging, and set a table where the lonely can finally be known.