Protect your peace. Cut off anyone who no longer serves you. If they weren’t with you at your lowest, they don’t get your highest. The vibe shifted, so I moved on. These lines pass for wisdom on social media and in church hallways. Read together, they make one claim: a relationship that makes you uncomfortable is probably bad for you, and leaving it is self-care. Sometimes it is. Usually, according to the voices gathered here, it is not, and the habit of leaving is part of why we feel so alone while surrounded by contacts.
Several voices from the Jude 3 Project library meet that claim from different directions: a friendship teacher, a Bible teacher, two pastors, a relationship coach, a discipleship leader and the host of these conversations. Their combined answer is pointed. Much of our loneliness comes from scripts we have absorbed: that real intimacy belongs to romance, that good friendships require no effort, and that a hard person is a toxic one. The word toxic names something real. But it has been stretched to cover ordinary friction, and Christians have accepted the stretch with little thought. At the same time, these voices defend leaving genuine harm, plainly and without hedging.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project and host of these conversations, captures the problem with the church version of the script in a single image: “you don’t say in the natural, I gotta cut my leg off for my whole body to be elevated.” A body that sheds its own members in order to rise is not rising.