Who Can Do It All Alone

Life was not meant to be lived alone. You ought to live such that you have at least one good friend. To have a friend, be a friend. And when it comes to ministry, no one ought to serve and care for others all alone. Christian ministry flows out of a community. While everyone may have different skills and knowledge to contribute, we need each other.

But in our culture, within the church and throughout our society, there is a special place in our hearts for those people that can thrive and achieve something great all by themselves. We have a special admiration for those gifted and talented women and men who can do so much seemingly all alone.
It is a mirage.

The downside of this mirage is that we become disappointed in ourselves when we need someone. We hold it against ourselves if we must lean on another in order to succeed. Thus even our achievements are cheapened because we couldn't do it all alone. We become miserable in our loneliness, as well as in our companionship. Ack!

What is the Christian to do - the one who wants to serve and lift up and listen and heal and be good news? Be in community. Let others into your life. Don't seek to go it alone. Cooperation and collaboration reflect your desire for community and accomplishment. Jesus may have gotten a lot more done all by himself, but he was fully human, and he chose twelve men to spend some years with him. And that was a better way.

Here are some reflections by Henri Nouwen on the temptation to do it all alone - life and ministry:

The second temptation to which Jesus was exposed was precisely the temptation to do something spectacular, something that could win him great applause. "Throw yourself from the parapet of the temple and let the angels catch you and carry you in their arms." But Jesus refused to be a stunt man. He did not come to prove himself.

When you look at today's Church, it is easy to see the prevalence of individualism among ministers and priests. Not too many of us have a vast repertoire of skills to be proud of, but most of us still feel that, if we have anything at all to show, it is something we have to do solo.

You could say that many of us feel like failed tightrope walkers who discovered that we did not have the power to draw thousands of people, that we could not make many conversions, that we did not have the talents to create beautiful liturgies, that we were not as popular with the youth, the young adults, or the elderly as we had hoped, and that we were not able to respond to the needs of our people as we had expected.

But most of us still feel that, ideally, we should have been able to do it all and do it successfully.

Stardom and individual heroism, which are such obvious aspects of our competitive society, are not at all alien to the Church. There too the dominant image is that of the self-made man or woman who can do it all alone.
~In the Name of Jesus, pg39-39