“Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’m certain I have talked before about the movie Into the Wild starring Emile Hirsch. It’s the true story of a young man who graduated college with the world at his fingertips. He came from a wealthy family, he was a great student, he was a gifted athlete, he could have done just about whatever his heart desired. As it turns out, and much to the chagrin of his parents, what his heart desired was to rid himself of all of his possessions and to then make his way to Alaskan wilderness where he would live off the land in peace and harmony with nature. Along the way, he made a number of different relationships that could have been life changing both for him and the folks on the other side of them, but each time he walked away from them in order to pursue his Alaskan vision. Well, lately I have been watching a lot of the series, Life Below Zero with my bride. It follows the lives of a handful of people living mostly off-the-grid and mostly lonely lives in the Alaskan wilderness. As with Into the Wild before it, Life Below Zero has not been for me an inspirational or idealized look at the spirit of adventure and a noble desire to leave as small a footprint on this world as possible. Instead, it has been a powerful reminder to me of just how important community really is.

I believe I have watched most of the 22 seasons of Life Below Zero. Along the way, I feel like I’ve gotten to know the characters who have been featured in the series. They are a variety of different ages. They come from a variety of different backgrounds. But with the exception of one, they have all come to Alaska in pursuit of the same basic goal: to live off the land and away from society. There are three characters who live in or near a community, but they spend much of their time away that community in pursuit of their subsistence lifestyle. All three of these live with their families in some capacity, including children. Nearly all the food they eat is what they can hunt or grow. If they have need of something, they make it or build it. It is all made to look very noble.

The other four major characters in the show all live alone. Two of them in particular from the early seasons have caught my eye recently. (We watched the series out of order because of where it was available and when.) These two young men, Dennis and Erik, live by themselves in small cabins that are pretty much literally in the middle of nowhere. One of the “towns” they live near, Wiseman, has an official population of 12. Of the two, one seems a great deal more competent and confident in his lifestyle. The other comes across like he knows enough to survive, but not a whole lot more. At the very least, he is choosing not to thrive. He lives in a cabin with no power. He doesn’t even have a generator. His only food is what he can hunt and preserve.

We later learn that he actually has a wife and kids. In other words, he has voluntarily chosen to live away from his wife and kids to pursue a solo, subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere Alaska. He is a 60 mile hike from the nearest road. If something happened to him, but for the camera crew somehow staying there with him, no one would know it. I have to be honest: nothing about that sounds noble to me. It sounds selfish.

That’s actually how the story of the young man in Into the Wild ended. He got to Alaska in the summer, started carving out for himself an idyllic life, but then winter arrived. He wasn’t prepared for it. He didn’t have all the supplies he needed. He didn’t really know how to hunt. He wasn’t a proficient trapper. He started to starve to death and in desperation ate some poisonous winter berries, got sick from it, and froze to death. Hikers found his body some months later and word finally made its way back to his family about his fate. I struggle to imagine not just the heartbreak, but the tragic confusion they must have felt at his decision to selfishly throw his life away, to walk away from all of his relationships and opportunities, for what amounted to nothing.

The idea both the movie and the long running series seem to be aimed at encouraging a kind of frontier-spirit in their viewers. They strive to make this isolated, subsistence lifestyle seem like a noble and courageous path to walk. The characters are living in harmony with nature. They generate very little pollution. Their carbon footprint is next to nothing. They don’t have much waste. Their surroundings are breathtakingly beautiful. What’s not to like?

As minimalistic as their lifestyles seem, though, they all have stuff. More specifically, they have stuff they didn’t make for themselves. They have guns. They have bullets. They have knives and axes. They have clothes and shoes. They have winter gear. Several of them have snowmobiles and four-wheelers. Those require maintenance. And fuel. While one of them has a sawmill and cuts his own trees and mills his own boards to build the various structures around his property, he didn’t make the sawmill. Neither did he make the tools he uses to maintain it. More than one of them live near water and so they have boats. Not only did they not make any of these things themselves, but all of these things took money to purchase and ship to their locations. In other words, they couldn’t do any of the things they are doing without the existence of a community to support them.

What these two shows demonstrate more than anything else is the surpassing importance of community. We were not made to live alone. The only reason these folks can is because there exists a community that makes their lifestyle possible. Without this broader society, what they are doing wouldn’t be possible at the very least in the way they are doing it. There is only one exception to that in the show, and that’s a mostly native Alaskan family who, while using a variety of modern tools in pursuit of their lifestyle, is doing so using ancient knowledge and wisdom for pursuing life in the harsh environment. But part of that wisdom is the importance of community.

You were made to live in community. And an online community doesn’t count. The more online our communities have become since the dawn and spread of social media, the lonelier and more mentally and relationally unhealthy we have become. In a twist of tragic irony, social media has been one of the most profoundly de-socializing aspects of our modern society. We need people. We need people who are close to us and who are involved in our lives. We need them to have the access to speak into our lives for encouragement and accountability and conviction. We need their wisdom. We need their strength. We need their companionship.

And we know this. We have always been drawn to form communities. It’s how we were created. We were created in the image of a triune God. He exists as a community. Our need for community is a proper and fitting reflection of this.

Let me go one step further here. If you are a follower of Jesus, you need a community of faith. You need the church. The very idea that a Christian can exist without the church is a lie of the devil. It is a profoundly unscriptural approach to the life of Christ. A Christian without a church is a professed follower of Jesus who isn’t really following Jesus. And I don’t just mean you need to occasionally attend a church. You need to be an invested member of a church. You need to be a vital part of a community of believers who are joined together in their pursuit of the advance of God’s kingdom in the world around them. You need the encouragement they provide. You need the accountability they can give you. You need the wisdom and correction you will find there. And they need all of those things from you.

Two are indeed better than one. Three is even better than that. If you are not a part of a community, you need to fix that and quickly. If you are a part of a community, be grateful for that and commit yourself to being a more productive and encouraging part of it than you already are. Be an active part of advancing the Gospel into the community around you and the next generation because of your role in that community. The whole world will be better because you did.