What we all need (the second thing) - part I

What is the very thing we need the most aside from God? To every Christian it seems obvious what the very first thing is. We were created by and for God. We were created to be in a relationship with God and created to enjoy Him. But what about the next thing after our relationship with God? What is the very thing that resonates deeply with every heart across nations and cultures?

To really explain this answer I am coming from the understanding that when Jesus says that the first and most important commandment is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, that He is also saying that this is also the very thing that will make you truly happy in life. I don't really think that is a huge jump of the imagination unless you subscribe to the view that God is a sadist, not truly good, and takes pleasure in our pain.

With that as a base, Jesus says the next important commandment is to love others. Which leads me to believe, the next thing that we need is each other. Besides most of the bible addressing how to relate to God, it does secondly address how we relate to each other. Don't steal your neighbors cow. If you do you need to pay him back.... blah blah blah. So we see Jesus telling us your relationship with your neighbor is also important.

I had a pretty deep conversation with a friend the other about how I have felt on some level disconnected from the church I call home. How despite the fact that i serve there, i didn't feel like i belonged. As I sat there in that car, depressing myself out of my mind, I realized something about how a lot of the problems I faced would be so much easier if I had felt like I was in a community and truly belonged. This in essence seemed to boil down the second human need for me. We all need community or people around us.

A few observations seem to back this up.
1) We have language. Other animals don't and yet do fine.
2) Prisoners often describe solitary as one of the worst experiences in prison
3) I worked at a place, where if necessary, kids would be "locked" in a safe room if they proved to be too violent (a person has to press down on a switch the whole entire time to "lock" the door). Kids often described this experience as worse then being placed in a physical non mechanical restraints. They haven't had to use it in my experience and where they have it usually isn't that long.
4) In my Psych 301 class, my professor talked about an experiment that was conducted where they simply asked participants to stay in a room with no one and with nothing to do. The participant that lasted the longest lasted 2-3 days and came out pretty disturbed by the whole experience while the next person after him lasted a whole 25 mins.

In my more personal observation, I have a friend who is gay and had a very bad experience with his church. He had asked for help from his church only to receive rejection and was told in "biblical language" that he needed to leave the church. He wasn't asking for them to accept his sin or to change him. What he wanted was a community to come round him. He then commented that people can live with being single but who could really live without community.

In an effort to show mercy to the ADD people such as myself. I will flesh this out in Part II.