Where has our sense of community gone?

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

What a fantastic day! It had been really hot in Liverpool, which is quite unusual. I had been out on the streets running a Street Meeting with a couple of friends. We have a life changing message. If we do not get out and tell people about it we would be being very selfish. Not everyone sees it the way we do. Some people on the streets think that we are imposing our views on them. Others are not really interested in anything apart from what is in front of them at that point in time.What do you think? Should we be going out to tell people the message from the Bible or do you think we should just believe what we believe and keep it to ourselves?

 

If I had a cure for cancer I would be a very selfish person if I did not make it available to all cancer sufferers. If you were in financial danger and were not aware of it (and I was) I would be very selfish if I did not talk to you about it. Good news and solutions to problems should be shared. One of the downsides of the busy modern age is that we have become very impersonal. In the past, community and family meant we shared a lot more and helped each other. There are still as many nice people in the world now but we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves. On occasions this has developed to the stage where we are not aware of others needs and we fail to raise the alarm when we spot people in difficulty.

The January Blues!

I read the following comment in the ‘The Guardian’ newspaper quite a while ago - ‘The  dilemma, I’m 22 years old and going into my fourth year in medical school. I have been using study to escape loneliness, insecurity and anxiety that arose from the stress of the course and my failure to establish friends’.

Another person wrote in The Telegraph “‘Life looks good on the surface - so why are we all so lonely?  ‘But you can’t be lonely,’ a friend tells me crossly. ‘You’re out  every night.’ The backhanded compliment makes me laugh. But it also makes me sad. On paper my life sounds glamorous. Denying  you  feel  lonely  makes no  more  sense  than  denying you  feel  hunger’” These are the comments of a high profile journalist who looks as if she is living the high life but most certainly doesn’t feel as if she is.

A new  national  commission  investigating loneliness  in  the  UK,  launched  in  January 2020, shows  that  a  fifth  of  the  population privately  admits  they  are  ‘always  or  often lonely’.  But  two-thirds  of  those people would never  confess  to  having  a  problem  in public. Here is the problem - loneliness is the devastating unseen result of the pressures and emptiness of modern life when people live devoid of real purpose and meaning.