A Second Family for Southeast Texas Church Members

Southeast Texas Churches Provide a 2nd Family for Golden Triangle Christians

One of the byproducts of America’s work/money obsessed culture is loneliness.

We are raised by our parents, and when we get a good job offer we move across the country or across the world- wherever the best salary can be found.

We pour ourselves into our new job to earn every pay raise and promotion. It is not uncommon for Americans to work 60 to 80 hours per week.

Somehow, we manage to meet someone and get married.

This becomes our life- the merging of work and family, often one more than the other. It becomes our identity, “I am a hard worker and a wife/husband”. We loosen our relationship with family (often simply because of time and geography), we lose touch with our childhood and school friends (they are working as many hours as we are- they have no more time to nurture a relationship than we do).

50+ percent of Americans will get divorced at least once.

When that happens, we face a pretty large identity crisis. We go from being, “Hard worker and wife/husband” to… hard worker.

For most of us, that is not a great identity if we stop to explore it.

When this happens, most people know there is a problem. No one grew up dreaming of becoming “a hard worker”. We grew up wanting to help people, to raise children (in our own home, not across town or across the state), to grow old with someone who is a partner in our lives.

What most people don’t know is, “What do I do about this?” For many, the one place they feel they truly fit and belong is work. They work harder and harder to climb a ladder they no longer really care about. They can lose their sadness and loneliness in work.

When the holidays come, the loneliness is intensified. Their families would love to see them, but it has been so long since they took the time/effort to go across the country to visit them and they feel like they’ll be branded with the failure of their marriage.

The loneliness can often grow into full blown depression during the holidays.

One buffer for this loneliness is our Southeast Texas churches. Attending the Wildwood Baptist Church Thanksgiving dinner, I was impressed by the genuine happiness of many people I knew to live alone. Here they had found a place where they belonged outside of work and career. They had found other people to interact with socially. To care about. To pray for and to be prayed for by.

They knew who they wanted to sit by and moved chairs and tables around so their “church family” groups could be together.

Attending the Thanksgiving service at Good Samaritan Church in Fred, I was reminded of how often Southeast Texans refer to, “My Church Family”.

After Hurricane Harvey, it was just as often church families as blood families who showed up to cut sheetrock, cut trees off of roofs, or take in house guests.

Does a Southeast Texas church family remove loneliness? I’m sure it doesn’t, not entirely. What it does offer is a healthy place to belong and to socialize and to be cared about. It gives you the chance to meet people with whom to sew, or golf, or fish, or hike, or play basketball, or to study the Bible.

Churches are also vastly more sensitive to divorce than they were ten years ago- you can often find your church a great place to safely reenter the dating world as well.

God can remove loneliness- and your Southeast Texas church is a great place to find him.