Craving connection

Deep connection. I think it's something I'm craving right now. I have a lot of contact with friends and colleagues via email, messaging, and even video calls, but I'm really missing face-to-face. Technology has easily adapted to meetings, to information-giving, and to "doing stuff". But not so easily to "hanging out", to the sorts of casual interactions that happen when a group gathers in one place. When you go to a physical meeting, there are interactions before, during, and after, that are life-giving and really hard to do unless you're very intentional about it online.

Photo of the new field and building at school.
Just like connecting with people online,
there is a barrier between the camera
and the scene. There, but not quite there.

The other day, in a small online chat group, I asked an acquaintance about how her new fridge was going. Weeks ago she'd asked advice about buying it and I wondered how it was going. If I'd asked that question in person it wouldn't have seemed strange, but in the middle of a chat, it did. That makes me sad.

I'm going to be bold and say that I'm also a little tired of being thrown together into small online groups of people who I've often only just met and being required to share personal things. It's for the purpose of prayer and is something missionaries engage in a fair bit. I've been going to prayer meetings like this for years, but at the moment it just seems overwhelming. 

Praying for one another is good. However, at these sorts of prayer meetings you are expected to share something personal for others to pray for you about. At the moment the most pressing things I want people to pray about are very personal and also complicated. So I'm struggling to know how to share that authentically as well as succinctly, and so that I am not too exposed with people I barely know. But also needing wisdom to know how to share in a way that others can understand enough without being overwhelmed.

Thankfully I've got a whole day of connection planned tomorrow with good friends. Friends who I know and trust. I hope that those hours will help soothe the irritation I'm feeling with these online prayer times. These are important meetings, but seem to me that at present many of them are only a shadow of true Christian fellowship.