One By One: A 7-Day Devotional By Gina DalfonzoSample

What Church Is All About

What does it mean on a practical level to see single people as people? It can start small—you might be surprised at how small. It can look like making sure single people are greeted at the church doors just as warmly as couples and families are. It can look like chatting with a single churchgoer during the coffee hour after church or small group, asking that person how things are going or how you can pray for him or her this week. It can look like inviting that person to sit with you and your family every week at church. Or asking him or her to lunch sometime. Or inviting him or her to your child’s birthday party or school play. 

These are little things, of course. But all these little things contribute to the slow and steady building of a real relationship, where you care about each other, listen to each other, and value each other.

You don’t have to understand everything your single friends are going through. The truth is you can’t fully understand it, any more than they can understand what you’re going through. That doesn’t mean you can’t be friends.

We need people in our lives who understand us . . . but we also need people who are coming from different backgrounds, stages of life, and points of view. We need these people to help us broaden our perspective, look at life from different angles, and get out of our comfortable shell. And they need us too. In fact, some of my closest friends have families, and we’ve learned that this can strengthen our friendships instead of weakening them. It takes work on both sides, but it’s work worth doing—work that needs to be done, if we take seriously Christ’s commands to love and serve our brothers and sisters. Sometimes they have to be patient with me and overlook my blunders or my thoughtlessness. Sometimes I have to do the same for them. Sometimes I have to realize that they can’t make time for me, and vice versa.

Making friends across barriers requires a lot of grace from both parties. But as the church of God, isn’t grace supposed to be what we’re all about?

What’s one small thing you can do this week to show a single person that you see him or her as a person?