Created From Relationship For relationship

​In the very earliest words of the bible we read - in the beginning there was nothing but the spirit of God hovering over the waters.

And so, if you think of God as I do, as the father, the son and the holy spirit - three persons in one - in the beginning there was nothing but a relationship.

In the midst of eternal nothingness, there was one relationship.

Trust me, nothing confuses me more than the idea of a triune God. I struggle daily to figure out the idea of one me let alone three of me.

But when you have come to consider relationships as foundational to life as I have, it's much easier to begin believing that a relationship was foundational to the creation of the world.

When that spirit looked upon the world and said let's create humanity, the spirit said, "let US make mankind in OUR image, in OUR likeness."

The relationship said let's make a relationship that looks like ours. Which is why after God created Adam he quickly declared, it's not good for man to be alone. God didn't believe this because he'd read it in some relational self help book; he believed it because he had spent eternity in a relationship.

God knew the most beautiful part of life was connection.

That's why every birth that further creates us in their image comes as a result of connection.

And each birth subsequently depends on human connection for survival.

We depend on relationship for survival because our creation was inspired by relationship, formed out of it and wired to forever be dependent on it.

Our self-help-you-can-go-it-alone culture often forgets we were created in THEIR image, not HIS image.

There's a lot of research that suggests that all of humanity has one struggle in common right now. We are all some level of lonely. And that research connects loneliness to a host of poor health risks and consequences.

Which begins to make sense when you embrace the truth that we were created out of relationship for relationship. An oven doesn't do a great job keeping your milk cold; it's not what it was created for.

Jesus was once asked about the secret to life - like it was the end of a long podcast interview and the interviewer wanted him to give a couple of nuggets listeners could take away as action steps.

Jesus said, love God (us) and love one another. And when Jesus said that, he said those two things - loving God (us) and loving one another - he said those two things were alike.

Because they are.

God said let's make them in our image. And that image was a loving relationship with one another. The father and the son and the holy spirit - there was no hate there.

Only love. Only togetherness. Only connection.

When we talk about a broken world, that's the brokenness. We were created in the image of relationship, and in so many ways we are working against that image.

I think we need to go back and listen to that episode. The one where Jesus said, love God; love one another.

It's our purpose. Anything else leads to brokenness.