“It is not good that the man should be alone.” — Genesis 2:18

The first night my daughter was born, she was screaming at 3 a.m. Like any first-time dad, I panicked and paged the nurse. She walked in as I stood there, anxiously cradling this wailing child. I looked at her and asked, “What do I do?”

“Did you feed her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you change her?”
“Yes.”

I thought we were getting somewhere.

Then she smirked and said, “Then it’s called parenting. Good luck.” And she walked out.

If you’ve ever raised children, you know this: you don’t have to teach a child how to throw a temper tantrum. No infant studies their parents and learns how to flail their arms, scream at full volume, and collapse into chaos.

That instinct is already there. It’s innate.

Scripture gives us the language for it. This is part of the distortion of original sin. Since the garden, when Adam and Eve rejected dependence on God, humanity has been bent inward—determined to live independently of the One we actually need most. We have an ache that goes deeper than food or clean diapers, because at our core, we are all people of need: a newborn baby, a person trapped in addiction, a family barely making ends meet, the captain of the football team, the captivating communicator, the most successful person in town.

They may appear different externally, but inwardly they are the same. Nothing in this world can satisfy their deepest hunger, because we all long to be held in the arms of our Heavenly Father.

When the triplets were born, I had a little more experience. But on that first night in the hospital, one of our boys was screaming just as loudly as his sister had. I fed him. I changed him. Nothing worked. So I tried something different. I put all three boys into the same bassinet. I wondered if they missed the eight months they had spent in constant contact with one another. This settled him almost immediately.

What he needed was to know he was not alone. And so do we.

Scripture tells us that the root cause of the fall was the “not goodness” of our loneliness. We were made not only for dependence on our Father, but also for connection with one another. The God who meets us in our need also places us with people who can help carry it.