A while ago while running errands, I saw a gutted phone booth. Though the word “phone” still identified it, today’s kids probably have no personal experience with these structures or the coin-operated phones that were in them.

When I was a child, each home was lucky to have a telephone, just one, and unless you lived in a city, you had to talk to an operator to make a call. Since we lived in the country, phone lines were shared, and if we picked up the phone and heard a conversation going on, we were to quickly put the receiver back into its cradle and try again later.

As a young teen I remember the first time we called our California cousins. Talking across 2000 miles was a phenomenon Dad wanted us to appreciate, and after the long distance operator had made the connection, Dad counted the seconds before we heard their “Hello?” on the other side of the country. It was remarkable!

Most humans have a need to communicate with others, which I believe is God-given. Some like lots of connections and others fewer, but everybody wants to link up somehow.

I recall reading about pioneers in this country who staked claims miles away from other folks, and with no one to talk to, they literally lost their minds. Similarly, prisons that have used solitary confinement as punishment find it causes serious mental and physical health problems and works against rehabilitation. As John Donne wrote, no man is an island, though God figured that out way before he did.

The Lord never intended we be without someone to talk to. After all, he physically entered the Garden of Eden each evening (after creating Adam) to converse directly with him. Surely these times were meaningful to both of them, but God also understood that his lone man needed another human to talk to, too. That’s what prompted him to make the beautiful Eve.

Of course God wants people to talk to him, too, but he also stresses the importance of communicating with each other, especially other Christians. He expounds at great length on why this is true, paralleling us to a human body with himself as the head.

He acknowledges that all of us are different, just like body parts are different, but says that together we make a wondrous, highly functional, effectively communicating whole. If one hurts, the others parts do, too. If another flourishes, the rest share in it. (1 Corinthians 12)

And he instructs us never to stop getting together or communicating, since he wants us to have conversations that uplift and also challenge each other.

And as far as the old phone booths go? These days there are all kinds of ways to use them.

“ Let us… not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encourage one another.” (Hebrews 10:24-25)