You Are Not An Island

 I’m sitting on a bench Monday night after my flag football team got mercy ruled.

The score was twenty-six to three.

However, the complete lack of ability I have to catch a football is not the point of this blog.

Sitting with my team captain, we watched the rest of the tournament. As we talked about the campus ministry we are both involved in, she asked me whether I had a personal testimony.

I began telling her about my experience in high school. I told her how joy is something I struggled with a lot in high school. I told her how after working at a summer camp and meeting incredible Christians, and being in an environment with such people, going back to high school with very few Christian friends was difficult, to say the least.

I struggled finding joy. I struggled finding friends who encouraged me to grow and kept me accountable spiritually.

“Have you ever heard the song Keep Making Me by the Sidewalk Prophets?” I asked her. I have begun to realize loneliness is something God intentionally uses.

“Because when we have nothing else here on this earth,” I said, “that’s when we desire him most.”

You see, I never dated in high school. I was never very good at anything I did in high school. I did not get into my dream college. My roommate I was supposed to have got moved to another building the day I moved in. And I never hit it off with my roommates the way I expected to.

“I was aware that God uses hard things in our life,” I told her, “But I never realized until recently God was actually teaching me a lesson by making me lonely.”

I told her how in high school being wanted by someone was something I thought a lot about. I told her how it was hard seeing all my friends in relationships when I was never in one.

“I wondered if there was something wrong with me,” I said. “But I realize now God used those lonely and hard times in my life to teach me to desire him more than anything.

After talking a little bit more, she asked me what I could do to have more joy in my life.

“I think I need fellowship,” I told her. Fellowship made the biggest difference when I worked at camp, and was the hardest thing to walk away from when I went back to high school.”

While I certainly think, loneliness is something God has used in my life, I know for a fact Christians are not called to be islands.

I told her that I have camp friends that I call every once in a while, for encouragement, and my accountability partner that I text daily who lives in Georgia.

“But it makes so much of a difference when you have that fellowship with someone who is near. A living breathing person you can see. I need someone here at college who I can read my bible with, who will encourage me to grow. Who will challenge me spiritually every day.”

“We can only grow so much alone,” I told her.

As Christians, having fellowship is so important.

Christ did not ask us to walk the journey alone.

If you do not already have one, I encourage you to get an accountability partner. An accountability partner is simply a fancy word for someone you text daily with what you read in your bible.

An accountability partner is also a person you give permission to call you out when they see you doing stuff you shouldn’t.

I also encourage you to seek people in your life who are little wiser and mature in their faith than you. Having these people in your life will encourage you to grow and become stronger in your faith. 

Hebrews 10:24-25 "And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our one assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near."

You are not called to be an island; you are called to be a family of believers.