Then God said, "Let us make man in
our image, in our likeness..."
Gen. 1:26
The Lord God said, "It is not good
for man to be alone. I will make a
helper suitable for him..."
Gen. 2:18

I am unable to understand how our God is one - ("Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God is one God") and also Father and Son and Holy Spirit. But this God said, "Let us make man in our image." Because I am made in the image of a God, who is One and who is also us and our, I know I need connections with others to be complete. Connections with others seems to be a basic need.

The rising rates of depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct disorders, suicide ideation, and other forms of mental and emotional distress among children and adolescents was the impetuous behind a study by the Commission on Children at Risk, A Report to the Nation, Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities. So what is their solution to this growing problem? It is people helping children and youth connect to others through authoritative communities, i.e., groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life (p. 14).

The Commission on Children at Risk, made up of 33 children's doctors, research scientists, and mental health and youth service professionals, came to the conclusion, after studying numerous other research studies, that human beings are hardwired to connect with other human beings. They came up with ten main planks to bolster their case for authoritative communities:

1) The mechanisms by which we become and stay attached to others are biologically primed and increasingly desirable in the basic structure of the brain.
2) Nurturing environments, or the lack of them, affect gene transcription and the development of brain circuitry.
3) The old "nature versus nurture" debate - focusing on whether heredity or environment is the main determinant of human conduct - is no longer relevant to serious discussions of child well-being and youth programming.
4) Adolescent risk-taking and novelty-seeking are connected to changes in brain structure and function.
5) Assigning meaning to gender in childhood and adolescence is a human universal that deeply influences well-being.
6) The beginning of morality is the biologically primed moralization of attachment.
7) The ongoing development of morality in later childhood and adolescence involves the human capacity to idealize individuals and ideas.
8) Primary nurturing relationships influence early spiritual development - call it the spiritualization of attachment - and spiritual development can influence us biologically in the same ways that primary nurturing relationships do.
9) Religiosity and spirituality significantly influence well-being.
10) The human brain appears to be organized to ask ultimate questions and seek ultimate answers (p. 15)

I leave you to peruse the research yourself and come to your own conclusions. I do want to point out some things that seem to click in my own mind about this subject. God put us in community when he established marriage, family, and church. Larry Crabb believes that the purpose of community is "to connect with people, to help them put to death their bad urges, to exercise self-control over unruly and immoral passions, especially during those seasons in the desert, those long nights of darkness, those surprising encounters with seemingly pointless difficulties, and those humbling moments when we see the damage our selfishness has caused someone else"(p.149)..."connecting begins when we enter into someone else's battle to experience God with the empathy of a fellow struggler and the faith to know it can happen" (p. 151). He also says that "our fiercest battles are fought when we seek with all our hearts to trust God so fully that we see every misfortune as something he [God] permits and wants to use, to know him so richly that we turn to no one and nothing else to experience what our souls long to enjoy, to love him so completely and with such consuming passion that we hate anything that comes between us and eagerly give it up. That's a battle I cannot win alone" (p. 150 from Connecting: A Radical New Vision. Neither Larry Crabb, nor I, nor anyone else can win this battle alone. We all need a Christ-following community that is waging the same war and will include us in the fight. I'm grateful to all those, both past and present, who have waged war with and for me.

Every person needs the kind of connection Larry Crabb describes, but what about all those children and adolescents out there who need this kind of connection and can't find it? What about all those adults out there who need this as well? Can we overcome our ingrained western cultural beliefs that "people prefer to be alone and want to take care of their own problems" themselves? We advise foreigners, who may be desparately lonely, to not seem too needy around Americans because that will cause them to back off from having a relationship with them. I warn missionaries and MKs who have acculturated to more community oriented cultures of the same thing (p. 12 from American Ways: A Guide to Foreigners in the United States by Gary Althen). One person alone cannot do it. But the community of Christ can, if we really want to. We can do it if we really do attempt to follow the first and second greatest commandments while carrying out the great commission. We can do it if we decide we are "our brother's keeper."

God loves the orphan and the widow and the foreigner in the land and I think He loves the socially unskilled who don't know how to get connected. He loves the floundering people in our society. He loves the children mothers and dads neglect. Would to God we could love this fragmented, disconnected generation like He does.