One is a lonely number…

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought – and is seeking – to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”
—Lesslie Newbigin

I’ve been reading some essays and thoughts by British missionary/pastor Lesslie Newbigin.
I spoke a few days ago to a friend of mine who seems disconnected, depressed, disengaged from life and love and faith.

About eight years ago now I went through a period of my life that still seems hazy. I wasn’t drugs…Life and love really. Pain and loss. Idolatry and withrawal. All the making of a full-blown depression. I remember that during this time I was a banquet server downtown at the convention center. It was a big building and many of the events were big enough that I could slip away un-noticed, find an empty room, and cry for God knows what and how long. I was embarrassed by the fact that I’d be in the middle of working, serving up some hot plate of chicken and sauce with vegetable medley to a table of ten at a black-tie affair—and the tears would arrive sometime before coffee and dessert.

I lived with 5 other guys in an apartment near campus. I’d go to class sometimes, until halfway through the quarter I dropped a few of those classes and found my respite in the bottom of a cup of coffee and 10 feet deep inside my soul. Most who knew me knew I was in depression, they knew it by the depth of my eyes and the fact that I had lost about 15 pounds and wasn’t eating all that much. No one knew what to say. Neither did I. I remember telling a friend of mine, “I don’t think I’m doing so well.” —he still didn’t know what to say.

I have suffered to know what it was about me, or my tears, that made it so hard for those around me to speak something into my life. I felt so alone because it seemed no one understood the depth of pain and loss that I was feeling, albeit somewhat irrational. I wasn’t sure what I was to say to my friend this week. So I prayed with him. I didn’t pray for him, though he has come to my mind to do so since then. I prayed with him. I read a psalm and prayed it with him. I think it was about God’s protection against enemies…and deliverance from those who seek our life. I prayed Mary’s prayer, the Magnificant, which says in part that…“my soul exalts in the Lord, my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior for he has been mind-full of the humble state of his bondservant…” I’m not sure if me and my friend trying to find our place in the story of David being hunted by enemies and the story of Mary finding out that she is with child, has anything to do with the conversation about the complexity of faith , but I think it might. Depression makes faith so hard, makes the leap seem so far and unappealing. I know in part that our business in life with one another, helping friends through depression and offering shoulders (not answers) for crying at funerals, has something to do with helping one another along and leaping together. In this, I echo Leslie Newbigin: “The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”