Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Two are better than one,
   because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
   one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
   and has no one to help them up.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, NIV

This verse of Ecclesiastes is a reminder of how essential it is in life to never be alone in what we are doing. While yes, there are times and seasons where we need solitude, even in those times and seasons, our solitude should never be truly alone. We are not meant to live our lives alone, we are meant to be in frequent communion with others.

While this verse gives us practical warnings against isolation, there are more reasons why we ought not be alone. For one, God declared at the beginning, “‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him,’” (Genesis 2:18). While God declared everything He made good, He declared that humanity’s isolation is not good, and thus He made another human to accompany Adam and be both a different being than him while yet, still like him. 

Ultimately, God’s declaration that being alone is not good for humanity comes from the very fact that God in His triune nature is not alone. Between the Father, Son, and Spirit, the trinity has a special, eternal sort of communion with one another in which there is both difference between one another and yet sameness in their unity.

We as the Church are called to embody this unity. This is a unity that is vastly different from uniformity and is instead more about coming together across differences and finding wholeness amongst each other when we see the uniting love of Christ overcomes any and all differences we have.

May we recognize our place in the global Church and learn to find unity with all those in the faith, reaching across differences and avoiding the traps of isolation and uniformity.