7th November 2025

I’m new to my neighbourhood. I have high hopes of making new friends and building community. I make eye contact, smile, and greet every neighbour I see. And some of them return the greeting. But many do not.

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself is a poem by Wallace Stevens. Borrowing that idea, author Greg Boyle describes, in The Whole Language, how we don’t want to settle for a description of the kingdom; we want the kingdom itself.

When I read that, I teared up. It connects very deeply to the longing in me. My desire for connection and unity with my neighbours is a longing for the kingdom itself. Do you long for more than ideas about the kingdom?

Longing can feel like sadness, but it indicates that there is more — more than ideas. Longing tethers me to hope — hope in Jesus’ restorative, reconciling action in my neighbourhood. I hope in the reality that we are created for belonging and kinship.

How do I cultivate belonging when my neighbours don’t appear to want to connect? I don’t have the answer. As Wendell Berry has said, ‘You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out — perhaps a little at a time.’ Perhaps I will have to live it out, a little at a time.

We wait. We pay attention to the goodness of the Lord. We stay consistently available and near. We smile. We will not settle for merely the idea of the kingdom kinship.

First published on 19 June 2024 in the GCI Update https://update.gci.org 

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