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Life, Unlike Dinner, Is Better When Shared

by James Barringer  
1/14/2010 / Christian Living

My girlfriend's mother eats with one arm wrapped protectively around her plate, as if guarding it. It seems that when she was younger, she would be eating food and talking animatedly to someone around her, and while she was preoccupied, her husband would slip his fork in and steal her food. It took a really long time before she wised up and started guarding her plate, and by now it's such a habit that, even when her husband isn't eating with her, she's still got her arm around the plate just in case.

I do sympathize with her, but I think that for the most part, life, unlike dinner, is better when shared. I want you to think for a second about the last time you got really great news or accomplished something major. Wasn't your first reaction to go tell people about it - or, if that wasn't possible for some reason, didn't you bounce off the walls until you could tell all your friends what had happened?

It's really interesting to me how universal this action is. Christians and non-Christians alike do it. People from every language and every culture do it. There's just this natural need to share our joy, and to some extent even our sorrow, with other people, and I think that means something important. Some things that are universal, like the tendency to lie to cover our own butts, are universal because people are naturally sinful, but some other things that we all do, like this need to share joy, point to the very heart of what it means to be a human.

And I think what it reveals is that the desire for relationships is planted deeply in us. I doubt very many of us have sat down and analyzed why we like sharing news; we just do it, because we're responding to some need at the core of our souls. We understand, in spite of the selfishness that plagues us, that life is not about us.

I wonder if this explains a little bit about why God created the angels. It certainly wasn't that he had a need for companionship, being that he was three-in-one already, experiencing perfect love and perfect community within himself before anything else existed. But I saw in Job 38 where God asks Job, "Were you there when I created the world, when all the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?" Why, exactly, do angels exist? Most people say that they're God's messengers or that they have some role to play in spiritual warfare, but it's not as if an infinitely powerful God needs any help with those things. No, I think he created the angels just to share in what he was doing, so that there was someone else around to celebrate the wonder of his mighty deeds and the glory of his holiness - which, coincidentally, is exactly what the angels spend the whole Bible doing.

That's also supposed to be what church is all about: we, God's people, worshiping him together and sharing in the things he is doing in each of our lives. It's simple and powerful. One of the neatest things to me is stepping into a church I don't go to and being able to celebrate the stories I hear from the people I've never met and may never meet again. The connection we have, faith in our God, is the greatest and deepest connection that two people could have. Sharing God together, and letting him use us all together to impact the world for him, is a beautiful thing. The only problem at all comes when people take church and make it about something other than celebrating God to each other, by injecting theological disputes and politics and dress codes and other things that distract us from enjoying and expanding our community. I once heard of a church that split because people disagreed about what color carpet to put in their new sanctuary. That's a church that needed to spend less time fighting and more time sharing God and life together.

I said earlier that I think this drive for relationships, this need to share life, is part of what makes us human, and I mean that. It's always struck me as a little bit unusual that, way back in the Garden of Eden, Adam and God walked face to face, but Adam was still lonely, and God said "It is not good for man to be alone." You wouldn't think that he could possibly be alone if he was in the presence of God, but according to God himself, that's exactly what happened. Life just wasn't the same without people who could share it, and Adam felt that loneliness in the core of his soul. It was a hole that not even God filled - which sounds blasphemous until we remember that God was the one who engineered Adam and therefore engineered the hole. We were built to share life, built to need relationships.

Life - possibly unlike dinner - is better when shared. As long as God is doing great things in your life, you have something to share with your friends, and they with you. You can laugh together, cry together, pray for one another, and fill that hole that God built you with. Just as it wasn't good for Adam to be alone, it's not good for you to be alone. God may not send you a wife (especially if you're a woman) the way he did Adam, but he absolutely means for you to know real community. If you don't, today can be the day you get moving toward it. If you already have friends who you share with, maybe this is a call for you to spend more time in those relationships, pursuing even closer community. Whatever God is calling you to, he's definitely calling you to share it.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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