Mines, Magnets, and Mosaics: How to Find “Your People”

Your people are the ones you will face the unwritten future with.

We all desire this. Who are they, and how do we find them?

The first thing you can do is learn to practice gratitude for all the gold you can mine from the gray tunnels of daily life. Gratitude is always on the threshold of discoveries and epiphanies—especially an authentic love for the One who made you.

Therefore, gratitude helps you find your people because the Creator is the one integrating all things into one coherent shalom, especially the coherence of deeper relationships. The same one drawing you near to himself is drawing others. Thus, increasing your proximity to the Father of all familyhood inevitably means closer proximity to others on the same long (and often lonesome) journey.

The second thing you can do is serve others no-strings-attached. True, there is the risk that others may misread your motives—for people are quite unaccustomed to a relationship without some sort of agenda or catch. It is easier for them to brand you than understand you. Nevertheless, by freely serving others, you set them free to form relationships, including with you. This is the ironic magnetism of living no-strings-attached: it inspires giving and receiving. It draws people together with an energizing freedom that accepts each as they are, yet calls them up to who they are meant to be.

The freedom helps you find your people, because, whatever else they may be, they are looking to your interests so that you are free to stop looking solely to your own. You are most alive when the overflow of your authentic self is energizing others.

The third thing you can do is become the unique-yet-unadorned person you truly are. Note both words: unique (your story alone ensures this state) and unadorned (when the makeup is off, you have much more in common with others than you realize). I’m not referring to the 2-D self of social media nor the head-down self at work. I’m referring to who you are when, like the Fellowship, you unpretentiously attempt to navigate your hard reality with a well-balanced burden of truth and love. Your personhood will, by default, express that truth and love in an uncopyable—one might say, indispensable—way.

Why is living as your unique-yet-unadorned self so crucial? Because you are revealed as the missing piece in the mosaic of relationships. You are the one who completes, course-corrects, and counterbalances the others. And you are the one who brings joy—in all your quirks and oddities—in a way no one else can.

Our ultimate purpose, in fact, has everything to do with growing in that joy until all things are saturated with it—even our suffering. For then we are no longer slaves to circumstances, but creators of a strangely attractive contagion influencing friend and foe alike.

When you do these three things, you are moving in the right direction of finding the ones you will face the unwritten future with: your people.

© Kurt Mähler