LonelinessSample

#3 Determine to View Loneliness as a Gift

It doesn’t feel like a gift, and most of us would prefer not to receive it. Yet, there it is daily, staring us in the face. Might this be a “daily bread” prayer to God? What if we asked Him for the grace to choose to view loneliness as a gift from Him? You may say, but I don’t like the feeling of loneliness! I agree. But do you like the feeling of hunger or thirst? We generally don’t want them, but we are thankful for them. While uncomfortable, they urge us toward what we need. If someone has no appetite or a sense of dehydration, that person is in a health crisis. Hunger and thirst cause us to seek the satisfaction of those desires. Loneliness is relational hunger. It sits in the pit of our souls uncomfortably. We can ignore it, distract it, satisfy it sinfully, resent it, or hate it. The key is to leverage it by seeing it as a gift and responding to it rightly.

What does that look like? Loneliness creates internal energy. It is a strong emotion. I respond to it negatively, and even sinfully, by coping with the pain in sinful or destructive ways. Or I can leverage that energy as motivation toward a more profound engagement with God and others. This requires discipline and self-control as my flesh urges self-destructive responses.

(Galations 5:16–17). The flesh is our remaining nature, our “indwelling sin.” It is a lingering spiritual enemy within that seizes upon any opportunity, temptation, or habit of life and weaponizes it against us and God’s good purpose in us. It is critical to understand how our internal enemy works. Our flesh is an active force seeking our spiritual pain and sorrow. It hates God and will apprehend the slightest prick of loneliness and seek to amplify it into bitterness, jealousy, and resentment.

Once loneliness enters the lower side of our nature, viewing it as a gift is very difficult as it produces the worst of human emotions. Embedded in unhealthy loneliness is the fear that we will always feel this way. Just as hunger can devolve into gluttony and thirst weaponized into alcoholism, loneliness is easily weaponized within us.

Augustine famously said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If this by yourself, cannot turn loneliness into a blessing. It is always a curse and a scourge. For some, they isolate themselves in the wilderness, literally or figuratively. The story of humanity is how much the hole in the heart hurts. How can we fill it? How can we find Augustine’s rest? The tale of loneliness is intertwined with the story of redemption. The gospel is God’s ultimate solution to our loneliness. Loneliness is what image bearers feel when something or someone we were made to live for is absent. The restoration of this Person means the mitigation of His absence. At the center of the gospel of Christianity is precisely this restoration via reconciliation with God. Sin created the breach. Repentance and faith in Christ restore us to God and, importantly for loneliness, God to us.

Through Christ, we are eternally reconciled to God. The “hole in our heart” is filled when we trust in Jesus as our Lord and Savior. God is ours forevermore.

Most people think about their loneliness in strictly horizontal terms. “If so-and-so didn’t reject me, I wouldn’t feel this way.” Or “If I had a best friend, spouse, child, grandma, or a decent bowling team in my life, I wouldn’t feel this way.” While all these relationships are valuable, if you have all of them but don’t reconcile with your Creator, the loneliness of the soul remains. We were made for much more than any horizontal relationship can provide. We were magnificently made for God, and we will never find lasting peace and diminished loneliness until we are spiritually restored to Him.

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