OvercomeSample

Love and Loneliness—Choosing Who Has Authority in Our Emotional Lives

THE LIE: “I am unloved and alone.”

THE TRUTH: God loves me the way I am, and He’d rather die than be without me.

Perhaps you have thoughts that reveal the real issue you fear—being alone and unloved. This is one of the major lies that humans fight. We are hardwired to love and be loved. We need people. We allow one another to feel valued, cared for, safe, and needed. 

Naturally, we wonder what would happen if, for whatever reason, we didn’t have people in our lives. But if we don’t arrest that single thought and stop it from spinning out of control, it can turn into a vortex of despair in which we succumb to the fear that eventually we’ll be isolated from all meaningful human relationships.

My revelation came when I was facing a horrible outcome: I had lost my mother a year earlier, and my father was terminally ill. Yet, deeper than the fear of my father dying was the horror of being left alone and unloved. That lie held me down. It consumed my energy and made me paranoid. 

I had to engage the process we introduced yesterday—how the lie had infiltrated my life through anxiety and depression, insinuated I was unlovable and would be left alone, intimidated me through distorting the truth, and finally, the lie sought to recreate my identity and life in the most despairing of ways. 

When you identify the lie and the fear that fuels it, your life begins to move from black and white to color or from flat to three-dimensional. For me, as I recognized the places and relationships in my life that this lie populated, I reclaimed lost ground. I began to notice the good things I had overlooked. 

The pressure I was under had blinded me to the abundant love that surrounded me on every side from my wonderful wife to our two children to my many friends—none of them ever gave up or stopped loving me. Immersed in the lie that I would be alone and unloved for the rest of my life, I would have missed all of that support from the people who love me.

Recognizing the love of those around you is why it is so important to look for the lie that is holding you down. Cut straight to the source of the fear you’re feeling and then ruthlessly cut it out of your life by replacing it with the truth: “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (I John 3:1).

Write down your fears or even say them out loud. Exposing your fears to the light is the first step.