Lately I’ve been feeling a loneliness and longing for other people.

Maybe it’s because I took a job out of state. I have a new job in a good company. For 1/2 my week I come home to a big empty apartment in a new city where I know almost no one. It’s so different from what I’ve been experiencing the past ~20 years, with my wife and several children. It has made me do a lot of thinking about friendship and romance and the community of Jesus Christ.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely, because I’ve felt this way before. I’ve felt this way more than once.

I think we underestimate the tremendous disconnect that has happened between people as we try to live without Jesus Christ to varying degrees. As we live without following Christ to varying degrees there is a disconnect and a consequence. Jesus is the only mediator between us and God so as we snub him and disregard him for whatever reason we isolate ourselves from God.

Jesus Christ is also the mediator between man and man. He who holds all things together, and so does he not hold together all real loving relationships? We usually do not fully understand this and therefore we attempt often substitute in other relationships. When we do this we prevent and preempt Jesus from giving us access to others in the way that we crave.

Sometimes we assume we want sex, sometimes it’s self-serving social experiences, that supposedly fulfill (yet they are fleeting). Other times we seek King-like figures for our lives, who we hope will mediate everything good for us. Figures like clergy or presidential politicians.

We pour hopes into relationships or experiences that are unable to mediate what only Christ can mediate to and for us.

Jesus is the only real access we have to God and to one another. We can access one another in other ways, but those ways disappoint. At best, we offer and receive a humanistic self-centered form of love. Or at best it’s a pleasurable physical relationship yet lacks real love and insight into life.

But if we (Jesus followers) can learn to allow Jesus Christ to insert himself between us and others. And he will if we will allow him. Then we find the true satisfaction from and among others in our lives.