Connected, Contagious, and Cared For
Growing up, I can remember picking up the phone at my grandmother’s house and hearing the voice of Mrs. Elizabeth, the switchboard operator. If I wanted to reach my grandfather at the A&P, I would tell her, and with kindness and a plug of the cord, she would connect me. It was never just about the technology — it was about the person who made the connection possible.
Over time, things changed. Switchboards gave way to phone trees, where one call led to another and another until the whole community was activated. Eventually came Instant Messenger, iPhones, and the 24-hour news cycle, and connection shifted from occasional and relational to constant and automated. Always on. Always moving. Always speaking.
In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler remind us that there are two simple rules in this connected age of ours: there is always connection, and there is always contagion. In truth something is always moving through us, between us, and beyond us. Joy is contagious. So is anger. Hope ripples. Fear and anxiety spread.
Dwight Friesen, in Thy Kingdom Connected, presses this truth further: we are, at the deepest level, networked persons. Who we are and how we live is not just about the isolated self but about the networks that shape us. What happens in one place ripples outward. When something tugs on one of us, it pulls on others too — sometimes gently, sometimes with real force. None of us, it turns out, is untouched when any of us are hurting.
Teilhard de Chardin called this living reality the Divine Milieu — the holy field in which everything lives and moves and has its being. That means these connections between us are — like invisible strings — not only human; they are charged with God’s own presence. They shimmer with Spirit. They shutter with grace.
As Christians, our ever-real-life-and-collective work is to nurture this invisible but very real field of connection: to notice where joy is reviving and help it grow; to sense when a strand is heavy and offer to carry it; to release the need to control what we cannot fix; and to hold on with care when reconciliation or lament is needed.
Ultimately this work is faithed not just on Sundays, but every day, every hour, every moment. Through prayers and casseroles, texts and calls, thank you cards and get well balloons, our work is simply and profoundly to tend what is fragile, to enliven what brings life, and to trust that the Spirit is at work in the whole web — binding us, moving through us, and carrying us together.
To be honest, until recently, I never really appreciated how important Mrs. Elizabeth was in her connective vocation. But now, I kind of imagine that all of us in some kind of a way are really switchboard operators. You, me, we, are the ones who take the call. Listen to the need and make the connection. Would that God‘s grace always guides our work. Would that compassion always be our response. Would that peace be our fruit. For make no mistake about it, we are truly all connected, and what the world needs now, is love.