Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Once again Jennie Allen is back with the right book for the times. If there's anything we've learned throughout the pandemic, it's that friends and family matter far more than perhaps we realized. But how do we strengthen those ties and make new ones? Jennie Allen walks us through the answers to these questions and more.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of Get Out of Your Head offers practical solutions for creating true community, the kind that’s crucial to our mental and spiritual health.

“My dear friend Jennie Allen shows us how to make true emotional connections with the right people so that our authentic relationships can be healthy for all.”—Lysa TerKeurst, author of It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way
 
In a world that’s both more connected and more isolating than ever before, we’re often tempted to do life alone, whether because we’re so busy or because relationships feel risky and hard. But science confirms that consistent, meaningful connection with others has a powerful impact on our well-being. We are meant to live known and loved. But so many are hiding behind emotional walls that we’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness.
 
In Find Your People, bestselling author Jennie Allen draws on fascinating insights from science and history, timeless biblical truth, and vulnerable stories from her own life to help you:

• overcome the barriers to making new friends and learn to initiate with easy-to-follow steps
• find simple ways to press through awkward to get to authentic in conversations
• understand how conflict can strengthen relationships rather than destroy them
• identify the type of friend you are and the types of friends you need
• learn the five practical ingredients you need to have the type of friends you’ve always longed for
 
You were created to play, engage, adventure, and explore—with others. In Find Your People, you’ll discover exactly how to dive into the deep end and experience the full wonder of community. Because while the ache of loneliness is real, it doesn’t have to be your reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593193396
Publisher:	The Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	19,312
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jennie Allen is the founder and visionary of IF:Gathering as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head, Made for This, Anything, and Nothing to Prove. A frequent speaker at national events and conferences, she is a passionate leader, following God’s call on her life to catalyze a generation to live what they believe. Jennie earned a master’s in biblical studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. She and her husband, Zac, have four children.

Read an Excerpt

1.

There Is Another Way

Do you believe that you were built for true, radical connection? Even if you’re an introvert, we all are physically, emotionally, and spiritually hardwired by God for relationship. From the moment you were born until you take your last breath, deep, authentic connection is the thing your soul most craves. Not just as an occasional experience, but as a reality woven into every day of your life.

But to access this reality, you’ll have to make some changes. Because something is fundamentally wrong with how we have built our lives.

We spend our evenings and weekends tucked into our little residences with our little family or our roommates or alone, staring at our little screens. We make dinner for just us and never want to trouble our neighbors for anything. We fill a small, little crevice called home with everything we could possibly need, we keep our doors locked tight, and we feel all safe and sound. But we’ve completely cut ourselves off from people outside our little self-protective world. We may feel comfortable and safe and independent and entertained.

But also we feel completely sad.

Nearly all of us live this way, and yet it’s just not working for any of us. As I mentioned, research says that more than three in five Americans report being chronically lonely, and that number is “on the rise.” These stats are indicators of a grave and costly crisis. Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts are all on the rise. Scientists now warn that loneliness is worse for our health than obesity, smoking, lack of access to health care, and physical inactivity.

So why are we letting it define our days?

Is this living? Is this how life is supposed to go?

Let me skip to the answer: No. It isn’t supposed to be this way! You know what you were actually built for?

•Long, meaningful conversations with people who have known you for years and would donate their kidney if you needed it.

•People who drop by with pizza and paper plates unannounced because they missed you and aren’t afraid to intrude.

•Regular unscheduled and unhurried time with people who feel like family, even if they aren’t.

•The obvious few who scream with joy when you share your awesome news and cry with you when you share your hard stuff.

•People who show up early to help you cook and stay late to clean up.

•People who hurt you and who are hurt by you, but who choose to work through it with you instead of both of you quitting on each other.

•People who live on mission beside you, who challenge you and make you better.

•People who know they are your people, and you are theirs. People who belong to each other.

This is a book about how to find our people—the ones we’ll live day in and day out with, the ones we’ll risk being fully known by, the ones we’ll gladly be inconvenienced by, the ones we will choose to love.

Yes, I know how complicated and exhausting making friends can be as an adult. Why didn’t anyone teach us how to do this? Does it really have to be this hard? What are we missing?

I begin this journey with you aware of two things:

1. People make up the best parts of life.

2. People make up the most painful parts of life.

And I assume you picked up this book with one of those two truths more prominently fixed in your mind. So, whether you come with hopes or with fears or with both, it’s okay. I suspect that if you really go all in with me, some of your fears may come true. But I also believe that your hopes will be exceeded.

It is possible to live connected—intimately connected—to other people.

But connection costs something, more than many are willing to pay.

If you choose to join me in this adventure of building authentic community, I promise that what you’ll gain in the bargain is more than worth it, but it will require you to reconsider most everything in your life today. Specifically:

•Your daily and weekly routines.

•The way that you buy groceries.

•The new neighborhood you’re considering.

•Whether or not you live near your family.

•The church you choose to be part of.

•What you do this weekend.

•And deeper still: how open you choose to be about your difficult marriage.

•And about your fight with anxiety, which is getting worse.

•And whether you’ll ask the hard question of the person you love who is drinking too much.

•And if you’ll forgive and fight for the people who have hurt you deeper than you could ever imagine.

Everything I’ll be asking of you in our journey together requires that you risk your comfort and your routines. And yet everything in your life aches for the change I am inviting you to experience. Because I am convinced that we have been going about this all wrong.


Waiting for Connection

I still remember the day when the thought occurred to me that I didn’t have any friends. I should clarify: I had plenty of friends, but those friends and I all had very full lives, which meant that our interactions were erratic—and rare. Back then, I was neck deep in parenting young kids as well as traveling a lot, speaking, and doing events with IF:Gathering, the ministry organization I lead. And while being on the road provided plenty of life-giving interactions with other women, reentry at home often came with a sting. Did any of my “friends” even realize I’d been gone? Did they know that I’d returned?

This was not my friends’ fault, of course. They had obligations, commitments, relationships, and jobs of their own. In fact, they likely were asking the same questions about me: “Does Jennie know what’s going on in my life? Does she even care?”

Isn’t this familiar? We’re all just kind of waiting for connection to find us. We’re waiting for someone else to initiate. Someone else to be there for us. Someone else to make the plans or ask the perfectly crafted question that helps us bare our souls.

Here’s what we do: We spend hours alone in our crowded, noisy, screen-lit worlds, we invest only sporadic time with acquaintances, and then we expect close friends to somehow appear in our busy lives. We think our acquaintances should just magically produce two to five BFFs. Then, we believe, our relational needs will be met.

But community is bigger than two or three friends. Community should be the way we live. Historically and practically, people in all countries and generations have found their friends from their larger village of interconnected people.

I’ve been nerding out researching this, and here’s what I’ve learned: there are scientific studies that show how many relationships we can manage and how we socially interact with people. Basically, we can handle a network of only about 150 people. Think of your Christmas list. People you talk to at least once or twice a year. Much more than that and it falls apart!

Inside that 150 are layers of friendship that deepen with how much time you spend with a person and the degree of your relationship with them. Research suggests that we can handle only fifty people in what we will call our acquaintances. Within those fifty people, there are fifteen people in our village. And within our village, we have a capacity to make five of them our BFFs. You read that right. Only five!

Extroverts may have slightly more capacity than five, but you get the picture.

How much time you spend face to face with a person is what determines where they fit in your 150. And what pushes people deeper into our inner circles of friends?

The amount of time we spend with them.

Time.

It is our best asset when it comes to building deep community.

So, as we begin, I want you to open your mind to something more than that handful of friends you’ve been picturing as your goal. My dream for you, God’s plan for you, is to build a culture of community in every part of your life.

My friend Curt, the neurorelational expert, said it this way: “Every newborn comes into this world looking for someone looking for her.” And that never quits being true.

You and I are both a little needy.

In fact, God built us this way.

And yet it’s hard to need people. No, it’s terrifying to need people, because sometimes when we acknowledge our need, we feel like there is no one who wants to take our call in the middle of the mess. Or at least that’s what I believe in the moment.

Editorial Reviews

An important, inspiring work about loneliness and the power of connection . . . Allen offers practical solutions to questions like how to find friends, how to make relationships less superficial, what a true community looks like, and how to navigate being ‘dumped’ by a friend.”—Katie Couric Media

“Easy solutions to create true connections, strengthen relationships and curb loneliness. With scientific insights and biblical references, Allen shares ways to identify the type of friend you need, how to have authentic conversations and more. It’s a sweet map to joy and connection.”—Woman’s World

“We know we need to do life with other people and have a supportive community around us instead of living in isolation, but we often wonder how when we’ve had friendships fail, we’ve been hurt, or we feel too busy to even make the effort. In Find Your People, my dear friend Jennie Allen shows us how to make true emotional connections with the right people so that our authentic relationships can be healthy for all.”—Lysa TerKeurst, #1 New York Times bestselling author and president of Proverbs 31 Ministries

“This book is a true reflection of God’s heart for us to experience authentic, vulnerable, and meaningful relationships.”—Sadie Robertson Huff, author, speaker, and founder of Live Original

“I can’t think of a better book or message for our current moment than Find Your People. We are starving for community, meaning, and deeper, more life-giving relationships—and Jennie gives us the road map to actually get there. This book is essential reading for our tired and lonely souls.”—Jefferson Bethke, New York Times bestselling author of Take Back Your Family

“In an age when we’re tempted to believe deep and meaningful friendships are impossible, Find Your People is a timely, practical resource.”—Ruth Chou Simons, Wall Street Journal bestselling author, artist, and founder of gracelaceddotcom

“Deep community is the path to health, joy, success, connection. Find Your People will inspire you, challenge you, and encourage you toward the relationships you need and want.”—Annie F. Downs, New York Times bestselling author of That Sounds Fun

“For this generation Jennie Allen is the vulnerable voice we need, and with Find Your People she has provided a beacon-illuminated map that is as practical as it is inspiring. Read this and find your people. Read this and find the life you have been hungering and thirsting for. Read this and find Jesus.”—Curt Thompson, MD, author of The Soul of Desire and The Soul of Shame

“In Find Your People, Jennie Allen shows us how to build deeper, stronger relationships that point us to Jesus and help us live out our God-given purpose.”—Christine Caine, speaker, author, and founder of Propel Women

From the Publisher