"All we need is need."

John Gerstner

We are little playwrights, each composing our dramas or letting them compose themselves around us, each sure that our drama is not drama or each convinced that our drama is the only drama. And God made us this way, which I cannot figure my way through. He set us in a garden with a plot to tend, a tree to stay away from, and a voice to ignore—and we couldn't even do that.

I have never been a fan of drama, but it has never stopped me from feeling alone in the universe (a gross misdiagnoses).

So when someone knows and someone understands my brokenness, it is tempting to stay there. To rest in that place where I am known or I feel known. To gather in the faint light of camaraderie, join hands that are desperate for human touch, and try to make sense of the parts that have fallen apart.

But in the end, sense is not always made in the gathering and that is why we must leave the faint light, the strong and calloused hands, and move back into places where we are misunderstood and ignored and unheard.

I am grateful for those times, though they are few, the moment I catch the eye of another and our souls sigh in unison: me too.

Me too.

...............

A friend wrote a book a few years ago and that book wrecked me from the inside out. We didn't know each other at the time and so when I tell him now what an affect that book had on me then, I make sure he knows that I am not in the business of flattery. If we were not friends, the book still would have wrecked me and because we are now friends, the book wrecks me more because I know how that book wrecked him.

But it doesn't change the fact that it was the balm and the comfort, the help and the nod I needed when I read it. I needed to be not-okay and his book helped me see that that was okay.

...............

My church has a saying, "We're okay if you're not okay," and it was the first thing I heard when I came here. This was what landed me slump-shouldered in the back row, tears falling unashamedly: to not be okay is a broken and beautiful thing.

But there's a second part of that mantra, "...but we're not okay for you to stay that way," and that is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Glory hasn't come yet, though, so it is Christ in us for now and He is the hope of Glory—and this resolves us, sets us, frees us, calms us.

Because we, none of us, are okay.