Keep Watching

Jim and Jamie Dutcher spent six years watching a wolf family in the mountains of Idaho. I read their book, The Wisdom of Wolves, and what they saw has stayed with me.

For a wolf, identity, safety, and purpose come from belonging. The pack comes first. Everything else follows. Within the pack there is play, constant communication, and a place for each one. The Dutchers name an alpha, a beta, an omega, and other researchers read wolf families differently. But the picture holds me. A place for the bold one and a place for the shy one. Room for what each can do and what each is still learning. I cannot tell you how true that is for wolves. I can tell you how badly I want it to be true for us.

As a spiritual director, I hear this longing in the people who sit with me. The ache for connection is not a modern weakness or a passing phase. It rises from our depths. We are made for a pack, and when we do not have one, we feel it in our bodies before we can name it.

I feel it too. My parents, my siblings, and my daughters all live in other states. I settle for calls and visits that come too far apart. Then a text arrives from one of the grands, late at night. GG, you awake? We talk for a few minutes. We connect. We go to sleep. It is small, and it is everything.

Young wolves leave, too. At one to three years old, they disperse, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles to find a mate and a territory of their own. The leaving is not a failure of the pack. It is how packs multiply. I hold onto that when I miss my daughters.

And I claim family where I am. Not in place of my daughters. Alongside them. Love multiplies, too.

Jesus knew this about us. He did not gather followers and leave them standing alone. He made a new kind of family. Anyone who has left home or family for his sake, he said, will receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions (Mark 10:29-30, ESV). Now, not only later. And not tidy. Belonging always costs something.

It took a long time to see wolves as family. In the Gospels, the wolf is the villain, snatching and scattering the sheep (John 10:12). That image did honest work for people who had every reason to be afraid. We know more now, not because they were foolish, but because people kept watching. What they found was a family. Wolves who grieve. Wolves who play.

That is what I cannot stop thinking about. Not the wolves. The watching.

We are so quick with each other. We decide who someone is, sometimes in an afternoon, and then we stop looking.

I am one of six. My siblings and I are sometimes on the same page (not often) about how to care for our parents, what to tell them, how honest to be with each other. It would be easy to sort us. Too different. Too harsh. Too hidden. Too judgy. Too emotional. The labels are always within reach. They are never entirely wrong, and never entirely right.

But when I keep looking, I find the goodness in each one of my siblings. Every time. It rarely looks like mine, and sometimes it takes years to surface. And I am one of the six. Someone could write me off just as easily. None of us has. We are working at staying a sibling pack through all the ways we see each other. It takes work, and it takes time.

So what if we stayed? What if we gave each other the six years the Dutchers gave their wolves, and kept watching for the gold?

That is what belonging asks of us. Not warmth. Patience. The willingness to keep looking at someone with hope long after we are sure we have them figured out, and to let ourselves be seen that way in return.

It is how God sees us. Long after everyone else has decided who we are, still looking. Still finding the gold.

Someone may be looking for the gold in you right now. You might not have noticed yet.

Prayer

God of connection, thank you for making us with a longing we cannot talk ourselves out of. When we feel apart, show us the family already forming around us, and give us the nerve to claim it. Give us patience with one another, and eyes that keep looking for the gold, the way you keep looking at us. Amen.

For your reflection

Where do you feel the pull to belong right now?

Who is in your pack, and how do you honor what each one brings?

Who have you already sorted, in your family or beyond it? What might surface if you kept looking for the gold?

Where is God inviting you into deeper belonging, and what would it cost you to say yes?