In the years since moving back to America, I’ve sometimes found myself getting caught up in the way “the world” works. After a lifetime of proudly being different from my peers and going against the flow because “any dead fish can swim downstream”—and making a string of countercultural decisions like getting married early, giving up an engineering career for motherhood and ministry, even saying farewell to friends and family to live and serve overseas—I suddenly found myself surrounded by American culture.

And I started absorbing it like the water one swims in.

There’s the pressure to work hard to make enough money because you can never have enough money and you always need more. There’s the pressure to look beautiful all the time—and in fact I’ve never felt uglier than after moving back to America. There’s the pull of easy entertainment and the never-ending scrolling and streaming, which is where most of our excess time goes.

Somehow I started believing that life is all about accomplishment and achievement and working hard and looking good because the economy is so bad and what makes you successful and important is working hard and earning it all by yourself. You gotta pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right?

But then I would feel like such a failure because I’m not accomplished, at least not in the world’s eyes—even though I’ve always worked very hard at the vocations God has given me. I started wondering what was wrong with me. Why can’t I do all these things on my own the way people (er, Americans) are supposed to and even appear to be able to do? Because when I looked around, I saw people who were genuinely successful and who didn’t appear to need God or faith in any way.

But the truth is that I do need God. I always have. I need His strength to do the things He’s asked of me. I need His power to fulfill the callings He’s placed upon my life. As Americans we may have grown up with this ideal of rugged individualism, but I can’t in any way see that it’s biblical. God’s original design was always to have us depend on Him and on others. It’s the way He made the world, but then the world made up its own rules and told us we have to live by them.

We don’t. Anyone I’ve ever talked to who’s been walking by faith a long time will say you need God, that there’s no way to do life over the long haul without God. This is simply not something you will hear in the world. The world says you can do it on your own and you do not need God. Nor do you need the church or other people—especially those pesky, hypocritical Christian people.

Except that’s not actually the way God architected the universe. He designed it for us to need Him and depend on Him, and He didn’t design it for us to just accomplish things by our own selves, through our own worthiness. He intended for us to look to the interest of others because of His example, because of His Holy Spirit empowerment. And to need others to look to our interests too.

Sometimes I am so desperately needy for God that I forget others are too. The truth is, we all are. It’s totally acceptable to live like the needy creatures we are, to live countercultural to the world, because the way the world is designed is not the way God designed it to be. Needing God isn’t a failure in abiding by the world’s rules; it’s actually exactly what is supposed to happen.

We need people too. God never intended for us to be alone. We see that from the very beginning in Genesis 2, and we see it all throughout the New Covenant as well. We need the community of Christ to be carried through this life. Sometimes I am carried, sometimes you are carried, but we all do the carrying, and we all take our turns being carried — sometimes even at the same time.

This is the beauty of the body of Christ.