Missing People

Missing people is one of the best things about life as a human being.

Okay, that might be an overstatement.  This isn’t: Missing people is a byproduct of some of the best things in our lives as human beings. It is perhaps possible to live without this experience, but I don’t think it’s possible to live well!  To live well, in my view, necessarily involves things like love and living in community, which always involve risk.  To experience community means exposing oneself to hurt and the costs of immediate pain, but it also means the long term risk certainty that the bonds of love will someday expose us to the experience of missing people, what we call all the feelings associated when we can’t be with those whom we have grown to love.

Can you blame me if I’m thinking about this a lot lately?

It sounds like the downside of loving people.  (It certainly feels like the downside sometimes.)  In reality, missing people is just a check.  It’s a little bit of feedback for your heart, letting you know that you’re actually connecting with people.  It lets you know that you’re taking community seriously, that you’re opening your heart to the people around you, or at least you have in your past.  It does pose the risk of the future, though, and tempts us to close our hearts to new relationships, lets we feel the hurt again.  Accepting the reality of missing people opens us up to the possibility of the future, though.  It lets us see not just the costs, but the possibility of how people can touch us and affect us.   Missing people shows us that we really do value people, that we are giving to and receiving from them on a substantial level.  It is, on some level, a measure of our willingness to expose ourselves to pain for the sake of community.

I’m in this stage right now where I’m already anticipating missing the people with whom we’ve lived in community over the past decade.  It hurts.

But I wouldn’t trade it.  This is the way I want to live my life.