From Loneliness to Connection: How to Build Meaningful Friendships & Community as a Christian Woman

Hey hey friends and welcome back to Faithfield Woman.

This is your host, Kristen.

Today we are starting a three part series on community, friendship and why so many of us feel alone.

And I can't wait to dive into today's episode.

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Hey hey friends.

We are going to start a three part series around community.

We will end up on the end of the street Part series talking about friendship and talking about building community partners.

Before we get there, we're going to dig into why so many of us are feeling lonely and isolated and what we can do about it and why it's so important.

The second part of the series we're going to talk about hospitality.

What is biblical hospitality and why do we need to be more aware of, you know, our habits, our patterns and if we're actually inviting people in to our lives.

And then finally we will wrap up with friendship and building community and why we're all called to do that and why it's so important for a healthy, vital and a life where we're thriving and Christlike.

So I can't wait to share this series with you.

Today we're going to dive into what is going on.

Why are the stats on loneliness and isolation so high and how can we all try to do something about that?

First, I want to start off with a little excerpt from the book Find you'd People by Jenny Allen about loneliness.

She says, I'm convinced a key reason for our loneliness is that we give up too easily.

Friendships take time.

A lot of time.

A lot of working it out, a lot of showing up, a lot of cleaning out closets, a lot of tears, a lot of laughter, a lot of food, a lot of inconvenience.

We give up so easily because it's costly, it's messy, it's hard is hard.

Take a minute, breathe in and accept that truth.

Okay?

Now hear me.

You can do hard things.

God is with you, in you and for you.

You, my friend, can show up, you can hurt someone and apologize, you can be hurt, forgive.

You can choose consistency and inconvenience and the friendship you will gain will be Worth it.

Oh, I love that.

And later in the series, I'm going to share some more of what Jenny Allen says about finding your people and building community.

But for day today, I want to dig into what are the stats telling us on loneliness.

Okay, so it says one in three Americans feel lonely every week.

And it says that.

Let's see, what else.

The Roots of Loneliness Project shares lots of stats and I want to share a couple of them with you.

On loneliness said 52% of Americans report feeling lonely.

And these stats I believe are from several years ago.

It says 47% of Americans report relationship with others are not meaningful.

57% of people that are single or not in America report eating all of their meals alone.

Vegas, D.C.

and Denver are three of the loneliest cities in the U.S.

three times above the national average.

South Carolina, it leads second for the most singles.

There's 49% of adults and they're single.

Seriously, the most searched term on Google trends is I'm lonely.

80% of people under 18 are lonely.

Sometimes 43% of 17 to 25 year olds feel lonely and less than half feel loved.

So the number isn't going down.

It stayed the same or barely.

It just slightly gone up.

Millennials say they are lonely.

73% of millennials say they're lonely at least sometimes.

22% of Gen Xers have feel like they have no close friends.

And in the US 61% of Gen Zers feel lonely.

And here is a stat.

It says pre Covid, 20% of people struggled with feelings of loneliness.

During COVID 58.1% of people felt much lonelier.

You guys, these stats are heartbreaking.

I literally started to have tears in my eyes when I was reading some of these numbers.

And I had heard something last week when I was at a one day workshop in D.C.

and someone said the devil blocks us through isolation.

And let me tell you, we are More isolated and lonely than ever now.

True, it's not the same as when Covid first happened, right?

That first year and a half, two years, everyone or most everyone was feeling isolated, and surely a lot of people were feeling lonely.

But the thing is, while those numbers have improved some in a lot of the age groups, we are still feeling lonely, we're feeling lost, and it's.

It's just a sad and scary thing, and we have to do something about it, both if we're the ones feeling lonely, but also we need to be the people that bring people in, that make people not feel lonely.

We can't just stay in our houses, Netflix, binging in on social media thinking because we have online friends, that that's the same as striking up a conversation, inviting somebody in.

We have to break this loneliness thing.

And here's the thing about it.

The reason I think we feel lonely is because we live in such bigger communities that we don't always have to get to know our neighbors.

And we somehow think that that's acceptable.

We go in our homes or our apartments or wherever we live, and we close the door when we're walking down the street or we're taking transportation or we're driving in our own cars.

We are self absorbed.

We're absorbed with our earbuds in, and we're not even noticing the people on the streets.

And we're definitely not many of us talking to our neighbors or talking to our friends that often, other than maybe texting, which is not the same as people showing up in our lives.

So what do we do about it?

Well, what we do about it is we start acknowledging that if we feel lonely or isolated, we're not the only ones.

Most of these stats showed that almost half of people in almost every age range, every demographic, every ethnicity, I mean, the data went on and on, on this project, the Roots of Loneliness project, but it's literally 47%, excuse me, to 80% for some things, that some people feel lonely regularly or some people feel lonely all the time.

They don't feel like they have those friends or people they can rely on.

It is literally a crisis.

And so, you know, suicide rates are up, levels of depression and mental health are up.

Something's got to give.

And so this first episode about building community is to just set the stage, right?

It's to say this is kind of the context of what's going on under the surface.

This is what's going on behind the closed doors.

This is what's going on behind our earbuds.

We're lonely and we don't know how to fix it.

We're isolated and we don't know what to do about it.

I actually met one of the people I met last week at the event that I was at, told me that they have been going to their same church for a very long time.

I mean, a decade, maybe two decades.

And they've been in different groups, but they really don't feel connected or like they have any close friends at their church.

Right.

I'm sure they have acquaintances, people they see regularly there.

And that just broke my heart.

But it's because it does take time.

Much like Jenny Allen's comment at the beginning, it takes time.

It takes hard work.

It takes commitment and clocking hours with someone to become their friend.

And in one of the future episodes, we'll talk about the different levels of getting to know somebody.

And it's good to have people at different levels.

It's not that everyone's going to become our closest friend.

You're only going to have a small one or two or three or four, or maybe a little bit more than that of a close group.

But we all need a couple people in our lives that we can count on, that we can call when we're having a hard time, when we're in crisis, when we want to celebrate, we need people to rally around us.

And so one of the things.

Well, one quote.

I'm sorry, one scripture that I want to share is one that most of you have probably heard before.

It's Ecclesiastes 4, 9, 12, which is basically just talking about two is better than one.

So it says two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.

For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.

But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up again.

If two lie together, they will keep warm.

But how can one keep warm alone?

And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him.

A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

This is the thing.

Throughout scripture, it talks about being in community with other people, doing a life with other people.

We were designed, for sure, for two things.

One was to be in community, right?

Way back, it might have been called a tribe or a village.

We were meant to live in community.

That's how we that's even how animals, they protect themselves by being part of a pack or part of a group or whatever they might be called.

And humans are the same way.

We can't go through life alone.

And Actually, there was a stat.

Where did I put it?

Hold on.

It was about, what is the detriment of.

Oh, here it is.

There's actually a real health impact to us with experiencing loneliness.

And I'm not talking about on occasion, I think we've all felt lonely, lonely or alone when we've walked through something, or maybe if we're struggling in a relationship or going through something hard.

So that's one thing.

But what I'm talking about is the longer we experience loneliness and we don't develop at least a single or more deep friendship, it really has profound impacts on our health.

So one study said the health effect of loneliness is profound on mortality.

It is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, day in and day out.

People that are lonely, people that don't have a couple, close people or a close community, they tend to not live as long of lives.

The stats have shown that.

That in the flu zones, the people that live the longest have either a few meaningful relationships or they're part of a group, or they're part village or their area where they do meaningful work.

And they have.

They regularly see people.

So this truly does matter.

And we have got to fix something.

If 80% of people under 18 feel lonely sometimes, if 57% of people 18 to 24 years old feel lonely, 73% of millennials say they're lonely.

Guys.

What?

I don't know what we've done wrong, but we've got to fix it.

We have to start reaching across the aisle, inviting people in.

We have to start talking to our kids, do more with them.

Even if they tell us no, we have to try harder.

It seems that we get so focused on work and all of these commitments, taking our kids places.

If your kids are younger or if they're older, watching and cheering them on in the activities they do.

Or maybe we're doing so much volunteer work, but we're so exhausted and we're worn out around the edges.

But my question to you is, how much of our day or week or month or year in that decade are we committing to developing deep and meaningful relationships with other people?

Because at the end of the day, at the end of our life, it will not the amount of hours we clocked or the amount of times that we did carpool.

And I am surely not saying that our work is not important and that taking our children places isn't important.

What I'm saying is that cannot be to the detriment of building community and developing deep friendships and deep family connections.

That matters for eternity.

Loving Other people.

Well, matters for eternity.

Working two more hours every day, working late into the night and exhausting yourself on work that will be there tomorrow is not going to change the world.

It will not change generations to come, and it will not change the love that you're putting out in the world.

So we all need to get intentional.

We need to kind of reflect on are we feeling lonely?

Are the people around us seeming lonely?

Are we ignoring the people we're walking by?

Are we ignoring our neighbors?

Are we part of the problem?

Or are we getting brave and we're asking the Holy Spirit to come into our day and help us be the person that says hello, that helps us be the person that says, hey, I'd love to meet you for coffee or hey, are you free?

I was thinking about having a couple people over.

It means going and joining a group, doing something new, getting out of your comfort zone.

And I what I will tell you is if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling isolated, the way that we get out of that place is by being a friend to someone else.

It's by being brave enough, putting down the fear or the worry or the anxiety about doing something new or being rejected by someone and showing the world, turning off our tv, setting down our our phones, maybe turning the ringer off and setting foot into the world in new rooms, in new spaces and new conversations.

That is how we're going to change this world of loneliness and despair and hopelessness.

But it's going to happen through conversations and connections.

It's not going to specifically happen online, and it's surely not going to happen when we're staring at our TV or staring at our smartphone as we're wa for our doctor's appointment or waiting in line at the grocery.

Strike up a conversation, say hello, look people in the eyes and smile.

Give them a compliment.

Let people know they're being seen.

Listen to people, give them hugs, even if you barely know them.

Oh, friends.

So this is just the setup for the next two conversations.

Next, we're going to talk about hospitality and what that looks like.

How can we all practice biblical hospitality?

How can we all have open hearts and open hands?

And then we will wrap up this series talking about friendship and how do we actually make friends as adults?

How do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and build relationships?

So I can't wait for you to join me in these next two series.

And listen, if you need some encouragement, you need a little pep talk, you just need to tell somebody, look, I have been feeling this way.

Reach out my email is kristinristenfitch.com you can message me on Instagram.

I'm hristenfitch, but I'm here for you and friends.

I hope that you have someone in your corner, but if you don't, I'm happy to be that person as you step through this journey of getting to know more people in your community.

Until next time, big hugs, big friends.

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