In my experience, female global workers are among some of the most compassionate, resilient, and tough women on the planet. 

So many of them have experienced muggings or robberies; acquired terrible, weird diseases in them or someone they love; fought poverty at the expense of their own sanity. They are helpers and adapters and world-changers and mothers to many and fighters. 

But I also know personal stories of a growing number of women who’ve literally had a mental breakdown in part due to isolation. Several more global workers I know are plodding through immense, intense seasons of depression, anxiety, and loss. 

The same factors that keep us muscling through without water or power or grandparents or a hot shower can at times lend themselves to the conviction we don’t truly need others. Or shielding ourselves from vulnerability in all forms. Or believing the burden and drama of friends doesn’t justify itself. In fact, there may be a physical lack of compatible friends in your isolated village, or where you don’t gel with any of the few expats around you. 

I am actively working toward more vulnerability with safe people. Toward relationships with a few more sinks of dirty dishes in the background, and a little less lipstick in the foreground. 

Sometimes the effort feels herculean. Sometimes I offer the appearance of authenticity–a “curated imperfection.” Sometimes I shy away simply because I’m a hot mess—forgetting the Church needs my weakness, too: “those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22). 

But separating myself from others is actually spiritual dysfunction: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Corinthians 12:21). When I choose aloneness—or don’t make the effort for connectedness and unity—I choose against God’s design of His Body. I choose against the tools of emotional health, vulnerability, and trust of others making me holy.  

But choosing community also means presenting, critically, a more whole Gospel to those around us: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).  

What’s the baby step you’ll take with me to choose vital friendship?