Not Good to Be Alone

Here’s the other half of my CSI story promised in the last post. I wanted to quote the Grissom speech from the end of the episode, but I didn’t remember enough of it to even summarize. So I do what you do in a situation like that—I googled. I didn’t find the speech (I ran across that quoted on another blog; great minds and all that). What Google did find for me was the “Talk CSI Forum.” This is a cyber-community of thousands of (very) dedicated people who like to talk all things CSI. There were 180 people ONLINE when I logged in, so this site gets slightly more traffic than tucksdenbighblog.

I scanned through some of the the discussions which ran the gambit from favorite characters and storylines, last week’s episode to what would happen in the next episode. Everyone agreed that Eric Szmanda (Greg) did a great job last week; everyone agreed that no one likes Kevin Federline (guest star last week). Many of the posts were written DURING the episode and gave a running commentary on what was happening and what would happen next on the show.

Silly? A huge online community dedicated to following fictional characters and made-up events on a weekly TV show? Yes, it does seem silly for people to get worked up over a TV show. But this drive toward community, the desire to find people with whom to share things, the void within us that drives us to others like us—that is not silly at all! That is something put inside us by our Creator. God did not create us to be alone. His observation in Eden that “it is not good for man to be alone” was not, I think, primarily a statement that Adam needed a wife. What he needed was a companion, a community. It was not good for him to be alone. It still isn’t. We are created for community, to share our lives with others like us.

When God calls us to Himself through Christ, he calls us into a community of faith—a church. May God help us to become the community of faith that we are called to be. Church is not a place to go to do holy things once a week. Church is a relationship in which the people of God share the life of God.