YOU AND ME AND ALL OF US

For most of us, our parents were aiming at a similar target; raising a kid that would grow up to be self-guided and fully independent. This, we believe, is the critical marker of arriving at adulthood. So, as kids we're taught to shake hands and be polite and muster up enough courage to ask a server at a restaurant for ketchup. All that adult rehearsal stuff was so that, one day, we'd grow up and be able to be on our own. But somewhere along that path to becoming a grown-up, "on our own" it started to take on shades of merely being alone. And, for a variety of reasons, we've trained ourselves to prefer alone-ness over any alternative. 

The result is that the best kind of life we can imagine seems to be the one with the least amount of contact with the primary source of our frustration: other people. The mountain of evidence notwithstanding, our determination to live free of interacting with other people may have resulted in a life with fewer obstacles, but we're far from better off because of it. We were made for two things, like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram: life with God and life with others. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at why the best kind of life is a YOU and ME and  ALL OF US kind of life.