You have more ways to reach people than any generation in history, and somehow it has never been easier to go a whole week without anyone really seeing you. About half of American teenagers now use an AI companion regularly, and a third of them say those conversations are as satisfying as talking with a real friend. It is easy to shake your head at that until you notice your own version of it: the group chat that stands in for a visit, the friendship maintained entirely in reactions and replies, the hard thing you would rather manage privately than hand to somebody. Nobody sat down and chose this. We just kept taking the option that cost less. But is a friendship that costs you nothing actually a friendship at all?In week two of our series Embodied, Pastor Luke Heirendt turns to a short letter the apostle John wrote to a church being worked over by teachers who claimed Jesus was never really human. John is fierce about it, because if Jesus was not flesh and blood, He could not save our flesh and blood. And then, at the end of that same letter, John does something small that turns out not to be small at all. He stops writing. He says he has much more to say, but he does not want to use paper and ink, because he would rather come and see them face-to-face so their joy can be complete. He was an old man. The roads were long and slow and genuinely dangerous. He chose the trip anyway. Put that beside the letter to the Hebrews, where the church is told to spur one another on, using a word that means friction, the kind you can only create in the same room, and a pattern starts to show: there are around sixty "one another" commands in the New Testament, and almost none of them can be obeyed from a couch. You can't one another if you're not around one another.For more info about our church community, or to connect with us, go to www.creekside.cc