I read an article yesterday in Christianity Today that was talking about depression in the U.S. One side-bar made mention of a study that found Amish communities have a markedly lower rate of depression than the rest of the U.S.
Commentators on this study see it as indicative of how stable their communal ties are. Community combats depression.
A couple of years ago I was doing some reading about small group communities. One book cited a study where they tracked two different cohorts of people: one that was fastidious about their diet and another whose primary trait was a vast and stable social network. The social ones out-lived their fruit-and-vegetable-eating counterparts.
A number of years ago I was talking with a distant cousin about her recently retired widower father. She'd done some research on retirees and the single most significant factor that indicated longevity of life post-retirement was community. She felt quite confident that her dad, with a lifetime of significant relationships in his small town, was going to be fine.
Of course most all of this research can be explained physiologically and psychologically. But given the fact that I believe a Relationship is at the center and the source of the universe, I think that there's some serious image-bearing-ness happening here.
So sell the car, de-wire the house, buy yourself a horse and buggy, and do whatever else it might take to get yourself into real community. The obstacles (internal, circumstantial, schedule-wise, and all the rest) are often great, sometimes they feel overwhelming. I know they often feel that way to me.
But the consequences of living a fragmented, isolated, dis-located life are too costly to ignore. And besides, I figure for every handful of real relationships I have, it roughly equals a couple Krispy Kreme doughnuts per week. That's some serious pay-off.
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