Hullo, Out There!: A Note to the Reader

I didn't understand how tired most Christians were until 2007. That year, I was working as a creative coordinator in a church of about two thousand members — a behind-the-scenes dream job for an introvert. At the beginning of every sermon series, the teaching team would talk with me about the main themes they wanted to convey and then invite me to design scripts, props, and visual art for Sunday mornings.

Easter needed to be special, so I talked our pastors into trying something risky. One week before the big service, we passed around baskets full of torn, colored tissue paper and asked our members to write a single word on their chosen piece — a word that captured their biggest sorrow or struggle. "Keep your word anonymous," I said. "Disguise your handwriting if you don't want anybody to know which one is yours, but be real with whatever you write down. That's important."

My secret plan? To transform these papers into seven eighteen-foot, backlit windows — a massive symbol of God's ability to turn brokenness into beauty. "Trust me," I begged the teaching team. "This is going to be great."

Yet this project that had seemed charmingly simple in my head ended up requiring hours of physical labor. For a week solid I worked, kneeling over huge frames made from wood and vinyl sheeting. Each tiny piece had to be decoupaged so that it fit into a grand design, effort that was close and tedious. On my hands and knees, I read every single paper. Abused. Cancer. Porn. Shame. Debt. Addict. Loneliness. My sexuality. Obesity. My mom. My son. HIV. Bankruptcy.

I don't know what Catholic priests feel when they sit listening to parishioners talk through hurt and shame, but I wasn't prepared for the gravity of two thousand confessions. After a decade of ministry, I had expected to read hard words, so I wasn't shocked by the types of struggles people admitted. The volume of the suffering of the church, though, knocked me flat. I didn't unfold one paper that said discouraged — I unfolded two hundred. This single word was written in feminine script, in shaky old handwriting, in masculine block letters, and in teenage bubble letters. All around me, people were carrying terrible burdens. I couldn't keep from crying as I spent those long days alone with the grief of the church, realizing at last that every smiling face I passed in the hallways each week had a story to tell.

The hardest words were written in faint, tiny letters. In these, I saw how difficult it had been to tell the whole truth. Even anonymously, an admission of reality had been terrifying for some. How the Lord must ache as he looks down upon the bare sorrows of his people! With that awareness, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament finally made a little more sense to me. Nothing but fire, smoke, and blood could express the smoldering depths of human pain. The New Testament also rang clearer, since nothing but the infusion of divine life could ever redeem such widespread death. As beautiful as humanity is at times, we are also deeply messed up, too helpless for anything less than the rescue of a God. Never again would I look into a body of Christians with the delusion that most of us were mostly okay.

By Saturday, I had spent close to sixty hours working. My neck was stiff, and every muscle in my body hurt, so when a team of men hung those hulking frames from our sanctuary walls, I could barely lift my chin to see the result. Yet, as they flipped on the backlights, I was floored. It had worked. Two thousand sorrows exploded into bursts of color and light. Cadmium yellow centers, orange and crimson flames, cool recesses of green, pools of blue and violet — could redemption really be so beautiful?

When our worshipers walked into the sanctuary on Easter, they didn't know what we had prepared. But as we lowered the room lights and illuminated the windows, they gasped. After church was over, they lingered in the sanctuary an hour or more, wandering until they found the tiny words that they had written. Then they looked outward, finding their confession surrounded by the confessions of others and realizing they weren't alone. The whole conversation was entirely anonymous, and yet it felt so intimate.

Friends threw arms around one another and prayed together, whispering. Others stood with their heads bowed. Some knelt. Eventually, the pastors decided to open the church during non-service hours so members could take time to process what we had discovered about ourselves and one another.

In some ways, I was reminded of New Yorkers post 9/11. Do you remember those first desperate hours, how strangers moved toward one another, bleeding and crying, leaning on one another's strength to walk through the rubble? Mass tragedy has a way of exposing our common frailty, and in such intersections of human tenderness and horror, all shields are down. Here we can at last confess, "The world is broken, and I am broken, and my need is dire."

Lonely in a Sea of Faces

When life is going well, most of us keep hacking away at daily life with all our troubles packed deep inside us. Sometimes our stories are too heavy and too complicated to talk about. Maybe we don't think anybody will listen or care, or maybe we've already tried friendships that didn't work. Some of us are working too many hours to even think beyond this week.

So here we are, surrounded by people from early morning till late at night but never really knowing or being known. In fact, Americans are more lonely now than at any point in our national history. According to Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, more than one-fourth of Americans claim to "have no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles or triumphs. If family members are not counted, the number doubles to more than half of Americans who have no one outside their immediate family with whom they can share confidences." Think about that. More than half of us.

This epidemic of loneliness is no respecter of milieu. While we might expect isolation in a big city, even in a tight-knit rural community, it's possible to feel like an outsider. Strong roots grow deep in small groups, but so do scars; if you've ever had to start over at ground zero of a small-town relational breakdown, you know how exhausting that whole process is. You have to get your nerve up to go to the grocery store because there's no telling whom you'll meet in the cereal aisle. Recovering local might make you stronger in the long run, but day in, day out, up-close survival wears you out.

Zooming out a bit more, social media can turn our lives into a lonely flurry of superficial interaction. We...