“And on a cold night, two under the same blanket can gain warmth from each other. But how can one be warm alone?” -Ecclesiastes 4:11

A few years ago, four of my college buddies and I decided to take a camping trip right after school got out. Now, you have to understand that our college semester ended in May, pre-Memorial Day, and we were located in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun rarely comes out before the middle of August. In May, the temperatures hover somewhere between forty and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. And it always rains. But we were college students, with untarnished appetites for adventures and hooligan-ing.

In our preparation, we decided that the most beautiful place within driving distance was Orcas Island, in the San Juans (whether we were right or not is still up for debate; other candidates include the Columbia Gorge, Mt. Rainier, and Canada). So we planned our trip; we were going tent camping in the San Juan Islands in May. Awesome…

We wanted to get as early a start as possible, but one of the other guys and I had a prior commitment the night school got out. Our solution? Leave after the evening commitment. It takes approximately five hours to get from Portland (where we went to school) to Anacortes (where the ferry leaves for Orcas Island), so we decided to drive all night. We left around 10:30pm, and made several stops along the way, so we got to Anacortes around 4am. The first ferry that day was scheduled to leave at 6:30am. We passed the time by tossing a Frisbee and hooligan-ing.

We got to the island at 7am, and found our campsite by 7:30am. As we drove past, we were surprised to find somebody in our site.

“Dude! Someone jacked our site! What’s up with that?” someone exclaimed.

“Dude. It says here that check in time is 1pm. We don’t have the site until this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

We collectively realized that in our excitement, we had traveled to the island way too early.

So we busied ourselves with more hooligan-ing.

By the time we got into our site and set up our tent, we were fatigued beyond recognition. None of us had slept for around 30 hours. We laid our tired bodies down for sleep, four college guys on the best adventure ever, yet too tired to enjoy any of it.

And then we had our second collective realization:

The San Juans in May are COLD!!!

After 10-15 minutes of trying to deny the cold and pretend we all were sleeping, someone finally broke the figurative and literal ice by shouting, “I’m freeeeeziiiing!”

Swallowing our last shreds of pride, we huddled together and engaged in the millennia old stay-warm technique of spooning. And as we slept in the warmth of each others’ embrace, it was good. It was very good.

I believe there is a lesson to be learned from this story (beyond “don’t go camping in the San Juans in May, and if you do, then bring a mummy bag and many layers of sweat pants”). Ecclesiastes talks about how people huddling together can keep warm, that no man can stay warm by himself. People need each other. We need community to survive against the many terrors the world throws at us. But within the story, there is one other small detail of vital importance: before warmth came to us, we had to admit to each other that we were freezing.

Often in life, we long to help people, to be a savior to them and care for their needs. Sadly, we are robbed of this pleasure by people refusing to open up and share their needs and weaknesses with us. For that matter, I am often guilty of hiding the fact that I’m cold, because I don’t want to appear needy. I don’t want other people to know that I can’t make it on my own.

I don’t know if we would have frozen to death that afternoon in Orcas Island (it certainly felt so at the time), but I know that life would have been more miserable if we hadn’t admitted our need for each other. And I know that life is going to be pretty tough for all of us if we don’t share about our needs with people we can trust.