No One Makes It Alone

The room is hot, the air is close, and the crowd is absolutely silent as they strain to catch every word of the Master. So many people have come in response to the news that Jesus was home in Capernaum, the crowd has spilled out into the street. Inside the house it is wall to wall people listening to Jesus teach. And then, suddenly, those nearest to Jesus feel pieces of ceiling falling on them, showering them with clumps of dirt and twigs and tile. Heads look up in amazement as the crowd watches a ragged hole open up in the ceiling, and then a mat being lowered into the room. The glare of the sunlight at first obscures the four men lowering their paralytic friend on the mat until it stops just in front of Jesus.

It takes the crowd a moment to realize what is happening. But Jesus takes the situation in clearly. These guys wanted their friend to get close to Him so much that they were willing to come through the roof!

Think about the faith that this required in the four friends. Someone had to lead. Someone had to persuade the rest of them that it was doable. You don’t think there was resistance or disagreement to overcome? It’s hard to imagine all four of the men, plus their paralytic friend saying, “Hey, what a great idea! We climb the roof with a paralyzed man, tie his bed to ropes, break through the roof, and drop him in front of a carpenter, and then expect this guy to be so happy that we’ve interrupted his teaching and wrecked his home that he heals our friend on the spot.”

It took planning. First, make sure it’s the right house before we bust through the roof. Second, make sure we don’t land our friend on the top of Jesus’ head. It took perseverance. But when Jesus said , “Son, your sins are forgiven. Get up and walk home.” Well, the group of friends clearly knew their efforts had been worth it.

This story shows us that the healing power of Jesus comes to the community of faith. The story suggests this important truth - no one makes it alone.

We have, however, persistent beliefs in our culture of the rugged individual and the innate talent. We are always on the lookout for “the natural.”

Psychologists for a generation have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that we assume has been settled – is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. There are only a few Sidney Crosby’s, Paul McCartney’s, or Bill Gates in the world. And yet this doesn’t mean what we think it means. For example, Anders Ericsson did a study at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music and divided the violin players into three groups – the stars (who had potential to be world-class soloists)l, the merely good, and the third group of those unlikely to ever play professionally. What made them different? What distinguished each group?

The striking thing they found was that there were no true “naturals.” The potentially world-class musicians were the ones who studied and practiced the most. They not only worked harder than their peers, they worked much, much harder. In fact researchers have found that once someone has enough talent to get to an elite music school or an elite hockey league, what separates them is always the amount of practice logged. Researchers have come up with what they believe to be a magic number of 10,000 hours. If you want to master anything, you have to put in roughly 10,000 hours or about ten years.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that “ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. Most people can only reach 10,000 hours by getting into a special program or having a special opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.

Take Bill Gates for example. You know his story – brilliant young math whiz, starts a little company called Microsoft with his friends. Through sheer brilliance builds it into a giant software company and now has more money in his change jar than I have in my 401k. But what you may not know is the advantages beyond his innate talent that Gates had. First, he had fairly wealthy, intelligent parents who took him out of public school because he was bored and sent him to a private school, where the mothers of the students, as a fundraiser one year, bought computers for the kids and started a computer club. Remember, this was 1968. Most colleges didn’t have computer labs, let alone high schools. Young Gates had all the opportunity he needed to do hours and hours of programming as an eighth grader in 1968. And boy, did he program.

“It was my obsession,” Gates says of his high school years. “I skipped athletics. I went up there (to the computer lab) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.” By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to start his own company, he had basically been programming nonstop for seven years, way beyond 10,000 hours. Was he smart and talented? Of course. But Gates also recognizes, “I was extremely lucky.” Lucky he had wealth and opportunity and people all along the way to help him. No one makes it alone.

Speaking of intelligence – researchers have also found that the relationship between intelligence and success works only up to a point. It’s like success in basketball – the tallest players aren’t always the best players. Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest of all time, is 6’6” tall. You only have to be tall enough. The same is true with intelligence. You only have to be smart enough. What’s more, researchers have done voluminous studies on children with very high IQ’s and found that the ones who are successful in life are not necessarily at the high end of the scale in intelligence, but they do have one thing that the others don’t have – a good family and a good community to support them.

You may have never heard of Chris Langan. Langan appeared on the quiz show 1 vs. 100 last year and won a lot of money. He was introduced this way:

“The average person has an IQ of one hundred,” the announcer intoned. “Einstein had an IQ of one fifty. Chris Langan has an IQ of one ninety-five.”

By measurement of IQ, Chris Langan is, if not the smartest, one of the smartest people alive in the whole world. Do you want to know what he is doing today? Basically he is an unemployed writer. He went on that quiz show cause he needed the money. His is a long story with the basic plot of line of a young boy who didn’t have the family and the community to help him succeed in the world. Chris Langan always felt alone in the world. He was and is, relationally paralyzed. He has no one to help him get off his mat. You can be the smartest person, the most talented, the most athletic, but no one, and I mean no one, makes it alone.

When Jesus heals people the healing is most often instantaneous, although he does require folks to do something – take up your pallet, go show yourself to a priest, etc. Our healing can be instantaneous, at least of the symptoms. But the work of healing of that ache within, the broken relationship, continues for a lifetime. And that’s work that we cannot accomplish alone. We need grace, we need truth, we need time. All these things become possible in community. None of these things really come in isolation. Isolation kills. It is what happened to Cain when he was banished from his family after murdering his brother. It’s what happened to Chris Langan. Isolation brings decay and death. Community brings life.

“Is there anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” James 5.13-16

The Church is like those Verizon wireless commercials – wherever you go, whatever challenges you face, you have a team with you, rooting for you, supporting you, keeping you connected.


There are forces in our lives that are trying to pull us away from each and out of community – financial problems, relationship troubles, grief and depression, leisure pursuits, and just plain silly distractions. We need help from community to deal with these forces and yet these are the very things that keep us away from church and each other. It grieves me to see someone drift away into the isolation of their problems when the Lord’s power, revealed in community, could heal them.

No one makes it alone. Everyone needs friends who care for them. Everyone needs community. As the church, this is our vision, it is in our DNA. Its something worth putting our time into – ten thousand hours if need be.