“Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” – Matthew 22:37-39
In recent years, our social media feeds have preached a curious kind of self-protection. With a swipe of the thumb we are told how to “recognize red flags,” how to identify “toxic people,” how to “cut draining individuals out of our lives,” and, most subtly of all, that solitude is superior to the irritation of ordinary human company.
It is as though we have turned the art of avoidance into a modern virtue.
Scripture indeed warns us against being unequally yoked with those who would pull us toward spiritual harm. We are cautioned not to bind ourselves, whether in close relationships or in partnerships, to those whose deepest loyalties lie elsewhere. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”Jesus urged us to carry the innocence of doves while retaining the serpent’s discernment when recognizing those who might mean us harm. (Matthew 10:16.)
However, the cultural habit of pruning people from our lives with the same efficiency we unfollow a stranger may have drifted far beyond wisdom.
C.S. Lewis once noted that fallen humanity is forever tempted to exaggerate a truth until it becomes a falsehood. Boundaries are good. Quietness is necessary. Jesus Himself repeatedly withdrew to pray, refused to be swayed by public opinion, and did not allow others to misuse His compassion. But the same Christ who retreated to lonely places also stepped into crowded ones… crowded with sinners, doubters, tax collectors, critics, and those who grated at the nerves of polite society. The Gospels do not show a Messiah curating His relationships for maximum comfort. They show a Savior who washed the feet of a betrayer, restored a denier, and welcomed a zealot and a tax collector into the same dinner circle. Jesus models a divine rebuke to our impulse to retreat into tidy isolation.
It is far easier, of course, to love humanity in theory than to love the one weary soul who talks too long, the family member who frustrates us, or the friend whose rough edges scrape against our own. Yet these very frictions are often the tools God uses to sand down our pride and self-centeredness. Community is not a reward for the already-refined; it is a workshop in which God shapes us through the inconvenience of others.
And He shapes them, in turn, through the inconvenience of us.
Ironically, for all our cultural obsession with “protecting our peace,” we have become one of the loneliest generations in history. Even secular studies now admit what Scripture declared from the first pages of Genesis: It is not good for man to be alone. Chronic loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking, and isolation erodes the soul as surely as it weakens the body.
We were designed for the warmth of shared burdens, shared meals, shared worship, and shared sanctification.
The solution, then, lies neither in boundary-less burnout nor in hyper-curated solitude. It lies in the slow, brave, ordinary grace of showing up, of choosing community over comfort, forgiveness over withdrawal, patience over pride.
To follow Christ is to imitate the One who knew the flaws of His companions more deeply than they knew them themselves, and yet called them “friends.”
So perhaps, the real red flag is not the imperfection of others, but the quiet voice within us insisting we would be holier, safer, calmer, wiser without them. For sanctification rarely happens in solitude. More often, it happens at close range, through the very people we are most tempted to cancel.