This week I’ve been taking notice of the way we humans experience wholeness through relationship. It’s popped up in movies, in conversations, in Emails, and just about everywhere I look. Relationship is the miracle balm that encircles our broken hearts and binds the fractured pieces of our lives together again.

It all goes back once more to the Father, Son, and Spirit, doesn’t it? The Triune God, the “One” who exists forever in the otherness of threeness created us in His image. Aloneness could never be natural because it is foreign to God himself. When we’re alone, we’re broken. It’s as simple as that. Solitary human hermits can never reflect the happy glory of a Trinity who laughs and dances together in joy.

“I have come to believe that the root of all our personal and emotional difficulties is a lack of togetherness, a failure to connect that keeps us from receiving life and prevents the life in us from spilling over onto others.” (Larry Crabb: Connecting)

It’s breaking my heart this week to see so many friends who are feeling disconnected, excluded, and abandoned. Even in the middle of writing this update I had a friend plop down and begin to pour her heart out about the pain of feeling alone. It seems to be everywhere I turn. If only we could believe, (REALLY believe), that Jesus has stepped into our freezing loneliness, broken down every wall of separation and adopted us into His Family, then maybe our healing would begin.

These two photos illustrate the power of relationship: in the first one, the premature twin on the left was struggling for her life in a separate incubator until a wise nurse moved them into a single incubator. When the frail baby’s sister put her arm around her, the weaker twin’s heart stabalized, and her temperature rose to normal.

The abandoned monkey in the second photo was close to death when it was rescued to an animal shelter in China. And even though it’s health began improving, the little monkey remained listless until he befriended a pigeon. From their “friendship” he drew a fresh lease on life.

What does this say about the stunning relational nature of the Trinity who created humans, monkeys and pigeons?  Would such a tender God, could such a tender God leave us as orphans?