The Greener Grass

On Distance, Disappointment, and Participation

Lately, I’ve been trying to understand a loneliness that exists even in the presence of people.

Not the loneliness of being alone. Not the loneliness of lacking relationships.

Something else — what I explored in The Bearable Weight of Belonging: the ache of wanting to participate and finding fewer places where participation still holds.

The loneliness of wanting to participate in life with others and struggling to find places where participation still feels possible.

I encounter people everywhere—at work, at church, in communities, online. Yet so often it feels as though we are standing beside one another while facing somewhere else.

Toward survival. Toward optimization. Toward success.
Toward the next opportunity.
Toward the next field.

Everyone seems to be searching.
Few seem to be participating.

And I have begun to wonder if the loneliness comes not from a lack of people,
but from a lack of participation.

Not participation in events. Not participation in organizations.

The kind of participation that creates belonging. The kind that turns neighbors into community.
The kind that allows a shared story to emerge.

Most of us begin life in fields we did not choose.

Families, neighborhoods, congregations, cultures, traditions.
We inherit them before we understand them.

Sooner or later, we discover they are imperfect.

The family disappoints us. The church wounds us. The community excludes us.
The tradition falls short of its ideals.

We see hypocrisy before history.
Failure before formation.
Pain before inheritance.

And so we leave.

Sometimes we should.

Some departures are necessary acts of wisdom. Some distances are required for healing.

But many of us carry something else with us when we go:

Somewhere there is a better field.

A cleaner field.
A field less burdened by contradiction.
A place where belonging comes without disappointment.

And so the search begins.

What starts as a search for belonging slowly becomes a search for a place worthy of belonging.

Still Grass

Many of us have learned that the grass is greener on the other side.

We often forget that it is still grass.

Different grass, perhaps. Healthier grass, perhaps.
Even the right grass for a season.

But still grass.

Still subject to drought. Still carrying weeds. Still requiring cultivation.
Still inhabited by human beings.

Every field eventually reveals the same truth.

People were already there.

They left footprints. They made mistakes.
They carried burdens. They created traditions.
They nurtured life. They wounded one another.

They repaired what they could. They left behind both gifts and scars.

The search for greener grass often becomes a search for a field untouched by disappointment.

Yet every field that sustains human life bears the marks of human hands.

The perfect field never arrives.

A field without tension cannot form us. A field with nothing but tension cannot sustain us.

Sustained comfort leads to stasis.
Sustained tension leads to fracture.

Life forms between them.

The same is true of communities. The same is true of belonging.

We often leave because a field becomes uncomfortable.

We often search because we imagine another field will be easier.

Yet every field capable of forming us eventually asks something of us.

Patience. Forgiveness. Commitment. Repair. Participation.

The absence of tension is not belonging. The presence of tension is not failure.

Perhaps formation was never meant to happen in perfect fields.

Perhaps it happens in fields where people remain long enough to cultivate life together. That is the work I’ve tried to name in Human Formation.

Distance

The grass appears greener for another reason.

Distance hides humanity.

From far away, every community appears coherent.
Every church appears healthy. Every organization appears aligned. Every field appears green.

Distance conceals the weeds.
Distance conceals the worn paths.
Distance conceals the labor required to sustain life there.
Distance conceals the conflicts, compromises, and sacrifices that made the field possible at all.

Most importantly, distance conceals the humans.

The grass was not greener because it was perfect.

It was greener because we were standing too far away to see it clearly.

The closer we move, the more human it becomes.
And the more human it becomes, the more it resembles every other field we have known.

I wonder if this is why so many of us keep moving.

Not only physically.

Emotionally. Relationally. Spiritually. Professionally.

I wonder if we keep searching for a field that feels untouched by the disappointments of the last one.

A church that will not disappoint.
A community that will not fracture.
A workplace that will not compromise.
A relationship that will not wound.
A tribe that will not divide.

Yet every field eventually reveals its humanity.

And so we move again.

What if we have lost confidence that imperfect community is still worth participating in?

It sometimes feels as though many of us have become skilled at evaluating communities.

Comparing them. Curating them. Moving between them. Leaving them.

We have become experts at deciding whether a field is worthy of our presence.
Less often do we ask what it means to cultivate life within it.

The question subtly shifts.

From:

How do I belong here?

To:

Is this place worthy of me?

Without realizing it, we become observers.

Consumers.

Audiences.

Protagonists of our own search.

Participants in fewer shared stories.

Yet participation asks something different.

What am I part of?

I think this is part of the loneliness I feel.

I know where achievement lives.
I know where productivity lives.
I know where ambition lives.
I know where entertainment lives.
I know where consumption lives.

What I find myself wondering is:

Where do people simply share life anymore?

Places where success is not the primary story. Places where survival is not the only story.
Places where people are allowed to be more than what they produce, earn, accomplish, or optimize.

Not because those things are unimportant.

Because they are not enough.

A community organized entirely around survival eventually forgets how to live.

A community organized entirely around success eventually forgets how to belong.

The shift I believe we need is what I’ve called the move from Common Era to Communion Era — from counting time to becoming within it together.

And perhaps that is part of the ache.

Not the absence of people. The absence of communion.

Yet I wonder if communion begins the moment we stop searching for untouched fields.

The moment we stop demanding that belonging be free of disappointment.
The moment we accept that every field worth inhabiting bears the marks of human hands.

Because every field worth inhabiting has been inhabited.

By people who struggled.
People who failed. People who hoped.
People who stayed. People who left.
People who tried to cultivate life anyway.

Before we were consumers, workers, leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals, or protagonists, we were participants.

Participants in families. Participants in neighborhoods. Participants in one another’s lives.

Maybe some of the loneliness of our age comes from forgetting that.

Not forgetting who we are. Forgetting what we belong to.

The grass may indeed be greener somewhere else. Sometimes it is.

But eventually we discover what every field reveals up close:

It’s still just grass.

Different grass. New grass. Greener grass, perhaps.

But still grass.

Still carrying weeds. Still carrying footprints. Still carrying evidence that people were there before us.

And maybe that was never the problem.

It was always the invitation.

Maturity is not finding a field untouched by human beings.
It is learning how to cultivate one together.

Because no one becomes fully human alone.

And no story becomes meaningful until it is shared.