Our fears are not exactly unsubstantiated. Looking at history, it was the powerful who “conquered” the land we now call the United States, and the powerful continue to be disproportionately rewarded here. The rich are exposed to boundless opportunity, while the poor are stuck in the riptides of poverty. Studies show that attractive people are paid as much as 13 percent more than their average-looking peers.1 Respect is instinctively given to families whose marriages are intact and whose children are the school “all-stars,” even with no idea of what goes on behind their closed doors. They are the Joneses, and we are determined to keep up. Between our protective subconscious and our cultural messages, it’s amazing that we ever open up to anyone at all, and confessing our own deepest ache to a confidant is certainly not something we do every day. Even meeting with a professional therapist, as beneficial as it may be, can potentially become a way to avoid vulnerable, organic relationships if we are not careful.
This lack of authentic connection creates a void inside the human person. Instinctively, we try to fill this space with other things. For most of us, it doesn’t take much introspection to acknowledge our tendency to consume as compensation for weakness or loneliness. Whether food, drink, shopping, Netflix, recreational drugs, or something else entirely, we each have respective addictions that we are happy to let fill the role of honest relational intimacy in our lives. But the further we run down the rabbit hole, the harder it becomes to see clearly, until one day we are brutally woken up to all that we’ve lost in the spending.
The internal gnawing we feel of needing connection, so familiar to the human experience, has the potential to bring us together; vulnerability births intimacy, after all, if we’re willing to go there. Such unity could be the very reason the Creator knit our bones and sinews into such an emotionally weighty reality. Unfortunately, statistics show that more of us feel greater isolation than ever before. In a 2016 interview with Fortune Magazine,2 the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, John Cacioppo, said numerous studies confirm that Americans are only getting lonelier. This was corroborated by the 2018 findings of a nationwide survey administered by health insurer Cigna. Out of twenty thousand individuals surveyed, nearly half reported that they sometimes or always felt alone. What’s more, 43 percent reported sometimes or always feeling that their relationships are not meaningful. These numbers are of epidemic proportions.
Statistics like these tell us the unity of connection isn’t happening, but Scripture tells us that it could. The Book of Genesis describes man and woman as being made in God’s own image, bearing the imprint of the Lord’s likeness. If the most powerful encounter a human being can experience is with the Living God, would we not be fools to discount the potency of touching the imago Dei that stands right in front of us when we take off the masks and let one another in?
The weakness of the human condition is a gift given to us so that we may truly encounter God in what Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the other.”3 Despite how it sounds, the “other” is not a gruesome alien from outer space; it’s simply a human being outside of oneself. But to take it one step further, let’s say the other is specifically a human being who appears different from yourself in some way, for that distinction is often critical when it comes to our level of discomfort.
Young children need little prompting to handle this well; they are refreshingly inclined to make friends with those who are different. It’s common for young parents to comment on the way their small child “doesn’t see” skin color or other physical differences, often with the mystified pride of having created a rare inclusive individual. But far from being the exception, this is a universal quality of all children at a certain developmental stage.4 Granted, perhaps your daughter is a particularly empathetic person, but the point here is that we have much to learn from all of our toddlers. Sadly, we seem to lose the ability to look past differences as we age. We become wary of those who have not shared our particular life experiences — yet another reason Jesus urged us to change our hearts to become like a little child (cf. Mt 18:3). We must return to the humble, welcoming state of childhood to enter the kingdom of God.
We must return to the humble, welcoming state of childhood to enter the kingdom of God.
Without a paradigm-altering confrontation with our own weakness, it is virtually impossible to feel true connection with the other on a significant level. If we are not in touch with our own smallness, our own sense of having fallen short of our hopes and ideals, we will never be able to authentically touch someone else’s vulnerability — the only place of true encounter. Instead, we will resort to power plays and intimidation games, and I’m not just talking about in the office or marketplace.
We put up walls around our hearts even against those we hold most dear. As we age, our relationships with our own parents can be the most difficult ones to maneuver. Often the same could be said of our adult siblings. Truly intimate friendships are rarer in adulthood than in childhood, as we become more comfortable operating out of self-sufficiency and grow less willing to express our emotional need for others. Marriage is, but for the grace of God, the most impossible relationship that we could ever have imagined. Parenthood is a breeding ground for control issues and fear. Estrangement of the heart is not relegated to disgruntled co-workers or the immigrant neighbor you feel too uncomfortable to really get to know. This instinct for self-preservation affects even the closest relationships in our lives.
We seek to operate from a place of power, because this makes us feel more protected from potential injury. We seek to control a relationship, whether through dominance or passive-aggression, because in this way we feel less likely to play the fool. But choosing these paths restrains us from the fullness of life that God desires for us. That fullness includes relationships that mine the depths of love, self-sacrifice that conforms us more to the image of our Savior, and inner change in all the ways we cannot see that we need.
For Christians who actively strive to live out their faith in the world, this human tendency to deny their own brokenness and grasp for power is subtler — and yet more dangerous — than they would like to believe. Instead of embodying a unitive humility, too many of us Christians instead spend a lot of time and volume on having all of the answers that others may or may not feel are important.
It is all too easy to jump into ministries of evangelism or service with the unconscious motivation of feeling strong and useful.
The painful truth is that our own weakness makes us uncomfortable, and the quickest way to ease that discomfort is to position ourselves in a place of power. If we’re honest with ourselves, we may be forced to admit that our efforts to help are not really about authentic encounter with one another as much as they are about how good it feels to be the one with the ability to offer solutions, whether material or theoretical. It is all too easy to jump into ministries of evangelism or service with the unconscious motivation of feeling strong and useful. Just as things like alcohol or shopping can be agents to numb the pain of our weakness, so too can ministry. In fact, it is perhaps the most perilous “fix” for a Christian, because it looks so good and altruistic that it’s easy to fool ourselves into believing we are in it for the right reasons.
Perhaps this seems harmless enough, as far as vices go. But when the curtain is pulled back, we see that ministry from a pedestal benefits no one: Not only does it diminish the dignity of those being served, but it chips away at our own humanity as well. When we are not in touch with the poverty of our own human condition, the work of ministry can fool us into thinking we have “arrived” and hence keep us from the wholeness that God desires for us. We continue to numb the places inside us where the Holy Spirit wants to come, and we deny ourselves the chance to see what riches the needy and marginalized have to offer.
This truth is not relegated to the works of mercy alone, but applies to our efforts of evangelism, too. Can we be honest about the pressure that comes with the word evangelism for a moment? Too many of us feel that, in order to be worthy of the title “evangelist,” we must be on the victorious side of a struggle. The result is that we feel either smugly superior or categorically disqualified. The pressure is