LonelinessSample

#2 Allow Loneliness Pain to Motivate You

“All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me.” (Job 19:19)

"The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy." (Proverbs 14:10)

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

We are far from the first people group to detest loneliness. The Bible includes people experiencing profound loneliness.

As these verses indicate, loneliness hurts. It hurts bad. Yet God embedded these prickly emotional reminders of how wonderful harmony with God and others can be. The pain is a measure of the loss. Not all pain is bad. Loneliness pain comes to us ethically neutral. What we do with it determines whether it is good or bad pain. When I work out, the muscle pain tells me I’m doing something good for me. It’s a good pain if I let it motivate me to further effort. That’s the goal of loneliness. Turn it into good pain. Our natural response is to make loneliness pain “bad” and then make the cause of the pain worse. Before you know it, you are building a cabin in the Upper Peninsula as a monument to your loneliness. When loneliness spirals downward, it dehumanizes and increases our pain.

Loneliness is our relational conscience. It tells us when something isn’t healthy or as healthy as possible. Or, like nerves in the body that indicate we are touching something too hot or too cold, the nerves are fulfilling their intended purpose. God put in us a relational nervous system. Emotional discomfort is loneliness doing its job.