Christ is just like the human body—a body is a unit and has many parts; and all the parts of the body are one body, even though there are many. -1 Cor. 12:12

I went out for lunch at a place that served all-day breakfast over Spring Break. With my family, enjoying our vacation, we sat and ate our pancakes and eggs. As we wrapped up our meal, the server turned to me and blurted out, “Did you have amniotic bands? My son did.”

Amniotic bands are a fairly rare (less than 1 in 1200) condition in pregnancy where thin, fiber-like bands develop and can tangle around the developing fetus. If amniotic bands wrap around developing limbs, they can restrict growth, resulting in limb difference at birth.

I replied, “No, but I get that a lot. How old is your son?”

“He’s three. He has differences on both his feet and some of his fingers on one hand. I just– can I ask you some questions?”

I hope you have a picture in your head of just how odd a scene this was. It was Saturday at noon in a crowded restaurant. She had an empty tray of dishes balanced in one hand, a stack of empty cups in the other. I was finishing the last of my coffee. Kids sick of staying seated made their way up and down the aisles. Forks clattered on plates as conversation rumbled all around. In that chaos, she stood and I sat, eyes locked.

“Of course. What do you want to talk about?”

Everything, it turned out. Does physical and occupational therapy really help? (Yes, absolutely.) Can a kid with one hand learn to type? (Yep.)  Would kids at school make fun of her son? (Probably, if we’re being honest, but she could help teachers work with classmates to understand limb differences and that might help.) Do prosthetics make a difference? (They can, depending on what each person needs.) What would help her son grow and thrive? (Encouragement, appropriate medical care, and a mom who cares enough to put herself out there to ask a stranger at lunch about it.) Would life be hard for him? (Yes, then no, then yes again, shaped by so much beyond any mother’s power to control.)

On we went for ten minutes, ignoring the bustle all around to just talk. At one point, she said, “I have some connections with other parents of kids with limb differences, but I don’t know anybody who looks like my son who’s an adult, you know? I just sort of have to hope that there’s a way for him to grow up as himself.”

It’s hard to put into words what it feels like to be the only one. If you’ve had the experience, you know, and if you don’t, I hope you’ll trust me when I say it’s hard. It is, however, made immeasurably easier when there’s even one other person who fits in the niche you’ve occupied alone up to that point. And, of course, that’s not just true for limb difference: it’s true for the kid with ADHD, for the gay man, for the couple going through infertility treatment, for the woman abused by her spouse, for the veteran with no one to talk to, for all the infinite ways a person can feel like nobody else gets it. That isolation is like a poison.

The best antidote I know to the poison of being the only one is story-telling. Personal, real, vulnerable story-telling, like the conversation I had with my server at lunch a few weeks ago. Like the conversations unfolding in the cottage meetings at RLC this Lent. Like the faith stories shared in worship on Wednesday evenings the past month. Being able to see ourselves reflected in the stories of others and experience the compassion of having our own stories received with empathy changes us. It gives us hope. It reassures us that we are not the only ones– and even if we somehow still feel like the only ones, we know that we are seen and understood by our fellow members of the body of Christ, and therefore by Jesus Christ himself. After all, since we are the body of Jesus, then the words we hear also ring in his ears. The people with whom we lock eyes are seen by Jesus. The stories we share are held in his memories, too.

Here in the body of Christ, no one is alone.