I live in the rural Midwest. Less than one mile from my suburban home, the land opens up to reveal corn and soy bean fields as far as the eye can see. The ground is flat in these parts, and the farms that tend the fields look as if they popped out of the soil like dandelions. Red barns and metal silos stand tall but lonely, separated from neighbors by tens if not hundreds of acres.

Winter seems to be the harshest for these homesteads. Without the shelter of trees, nearby houses, or corn stalks to dampen the wind, the chill whips across the barren ground. Unprotected, these farms have no choice but to take what the elements dish out and to wait in hope of spring.

More than once, I have felt a lonely kinship with these small farms—isolated and bearing winter alone. I call out to God on land that is silent, with no one nearby to hear me. My desperate voice echoes across frozen fields only to be lost in the distance I had created for myself. “Neighbors would be nice right about now,” I think regretfully, aching for a tangible hand on my arm to tell me everything is going to be okay.

I am not the only one who has lived this way. How often we are like silos—tall and proud with shiny exteriors. We like to think that all that land surrounding us works in our favor, until it doesn’t. Until we ache for the comfort of community, to be near and known. Until we long for a warm embrace or a glimmer of shared humanity mirrored in another person’s eyes.

Independence is not a path that leads to deep connection. And yet, so often that’s the gravel road we travel. We forget that community isn’t something we dreamed up; it is the soil where we began—and where our souls long to return.

In the beginning, God declared that “it is not good for the man to be alone,”[1] and while the first man was made out of dust and the breath of God, humankind was formed out of common flesh. A person became a people when skin and bone were woven together by the very hands of God.

That image is stunning. It is a picture not only of the creativity and compassion of God himself, but also of how interconnected our existence began—the Divine Community of God, God with us, us with each other. No silos. No separation. Life with God and life with each other was intertwined.

And this woven-together life was not just a good idea in the beginning; it is how we are wired. The solitary life simply doesn’t jive with the way God hung the cosmos. From growing in our mother’s wombs to stopping at a traffic light, we are dependent in big and small ways. We cannot escape our need, for our good and God’s glory, and it is why Jesus himself boiled all the laws down to two:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Mt. 22:37-38 NIV)

The proximity and the simplicity of these commands was not an accident. We need them both. “Love God” and “love each other” are not two plants we place separately on a kitchen window and hope they’ll grow. No, they’re in the same pot. We must water them both and let their roots grow deep, winding in and through each other. And when winter recedes and flourishing comes, we can then hold them tenderly as a gift, because even fruit that comes from walking with God—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and so on—is not for us to eat but to offer to each other. [2]

We long for more because we were made for more—with God and with each other. So let us abandon our silos and continue this sacred movement toward each other until everything is so interlocked that we come to the other side of Jesus’ prayer, that “all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”[3]

***

This post focused on the idea of our interconnected relationships with God and with each other, so in case you’re thinking, “Yeah, okay, but how?” my next post will offer some practical actions that are helping me trade my independence for a life of presence. To be alerted to new posts (which generally come on Mondays), simply add your email address to subscribe to blog updates.

NOTES:

[1] This quote is specifically from Genesis 2:18 (NIV), but I recommend reading all of Genesis 1-2 for a fuller picture of the creation story.
[2] Here I am referring to what many people call the “fruit of the Spirit,” found in Galatians 5:22-23, which describes what it looks like to live within the freedom of a life with God.
[3] One of my favorite passages about the interconnected nature of our relationship with God and with each other (outside the Genesis account) is from this passage in John 17, particularly the part where Jesus prays for all believers (v. 20-26).

feature image by Joshua Michaels via unsplash

The Life of a Silo (And Why We Long for More)