The Necessity of Loneliness

A few weeks back I was in church & once again sort of struggling with encountering God in the midst of worship & one of the leadership got up, did the announcements & then talked about how Christmas was one of the most amazing times because it was when Jesus became real. He then went on to talk about how that, for a lot of people, Christmas is also a very lonely time & so he asked everyone that was lonely to stand up so that others could gather around & pray for them.

And yeah, I know it was done with the best of intentions, I know it was done from a good heart that saw a problem & wanted to help. But honestly, being one of those lonely people, I was angry. No, check that, I was livid….

I stood up to get prayed for, mostly ‘cause I try to be sort of honest-ish in public & since I’m just about always lonely I fit into the “lonely people” category, But I did NOT want anyone to pray for me. Sure the people who came up & prayed for me were nice & great & said wonderful things & were likely praying great prayers, but I was angry & stayed all stiff ‘cause I didn’t want the prayers & didn’t want to hear anyone praying for God to ‘fix’ my loneliness…..

Part of the anger came from the thoughts that if someone really wanted to help ‘fix’ my loneliness that they should pick up the @#$% phone & call me to hang out instead of saying they’d pray for me at church. It’s like John & James talk about in the Bible where someone is starving or homeless or naked & the Christian folk say, “oh, let me pray for you” instead of giving them food or a place to stay or clothes to wear. John goes far enough to say in 1 John 3:17 & 18, that if someone has the ability to provide for the needs of a brother & holds back their compassion on them, then how can the love of God be in them. With the whole loneliness thing, I don’t really need prayers, I need friends who will care about me enough that they want to get to know me….

…and yeah, I know prayer is good & I know it likely never hurts to pray for someone. I know that there is an important aspect of loneliness that can only really be addressed on a spiritual level of some kind, but really though… God’s given us the practical solution to help people’s loneliness & standing there next to someone who is lonely & offering prayers for them, well, really just doesn’t cut it. Being one of those lonely people it just makes you feel that much more desolate when first you’re ‘exposed’ as some ‘freak’ ‘cause you’re one of those social outcasts who is ‘lonely’ and doesn’t fit in the right crowd or obviously doesn’t have enough friends or something…and then when people rush in to pray for you & tell God to fix your loneliness & then they all pat you on the back & walk away & don’t talk to you any further than that, well, yeah….all it really does is help reinforce the loneliness. People can pray for my loneliness like it’s some disease & ask God to cure it & so I warrant enough time to be someone’s prayer project for the week, but I don’t rank high enough to warrant actually taking the effort to extend friendship to me….

…the flip side of all of this is that I don’t really want any more friends. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the friends that I have & so adding more to the list would just increase the number of people I feel bad about not hanging out with. (and the last thing I want is someone trying to be friends with me out of pity or ‘cause they’re trying to fix my loneliness….The balm for loneliness is love & there has to be a certain level of respect that comes with love. I want to be loved ‘cause I’m valued by someone, not because I’m a charity case. I may well be a charity case, I just don’t want to get treated like one….

The other part of my anger came because I felt that people just didn’t understand loneliness. You can’t fix loneliness through prayer. You really can’t ‘fix’ loneliness at all. (and, granted, it’s maybe my limited view on prayer that we pray for God to ‘fix’ a problem in someone’s life. Prayer can be very much us just talking to God on someone’s behalf & conversing with God about the issue.).

I’ve wrestled with loneliness for the large majority of my life. I’ve always felt on the outside of things & have always longed to be closer to someone, anyone, than I actually am. I’ve found this to be a bit of a disorder ‘cause even when I am sort of close to someone I keep asking for more which then ends up driving people away ‘cause they feel a bit squished….

Loneliness comes & goes. For me, loneliness is like a wolf stalking you through the wastelands of your life. No matter where you go or what you do, it is always there, just out of sight, waiting for you, following you, haunting you, stalking you like a merciless predator. Sometimes loneliness finds you when you’re alone, in the midst of desolation where it feels like nothing matters in life & you’ve lost your will to try again. Other times, loneliness finds you in the very best of circumstances, where everything is right & perfect, but you still feel there is something missing…. Loneliness finds you in the solitary places & in the populated ones. You can be in a room full of people & feel totally isolated & like no one understands you. You can even be wrapped in a lovers arms & realize that they have no idea what your brain is thinking or heart is feeling….

…this is what’s so disconcerting with loneliness – that it never leaves, it’s inescapable & even in the times where loneliness shouldn’t be there, it is. Don’t get me wrong. There are still great times, times when I feel a part of things, where I feel loved or valued. There are times where I don’t feel lonely. But these times just don’t last. Loneliness is always there, waiting, staring at me with it’s yellow eyes, waiting for me to step away from the shelter of friends or family & return to just myself. (this is one of the negatives of the single life – sooner or later you’re alone and if nothing else, the bed can seem awful empty on those dark, cold, solitary nights)

But I’ve found that the wolf of loneliness is not predator, it is more ‘spirit guide’ (or, if you prefer, The Spirit’s guide). Loneliness is a teacher & a protector, a guide & a guardian. What loneliness does most of all is leave me empty, leave me looking for something. Loneliness helps me show compassion to others. Because of my acquaintance, my familiarity, with loneliness, I can never enter a room & not notice the people who are alone. Loneliness drives me to long for community, to long for intimacy & so it drives me to look for the ‘lonely people’ & to try to help them find friends. Loneliness protects me from my selfishness & self-sufficiency. Often I’m tempted in my introvertedness to just hole up in my house & never come out. I’d be quite content there for the most part. But the loneliness brings me out, makes me long for community, long to learn how to love & be loved & so I end up going out over & over making failed/successful attempts at making friendships/building community. Loneliness teaches me that I was made to love & be loved. Loneliness teaches me that no matter how good it gets, how great things may go at my job, how many accolades I may get, or what I may achieve, it’s all empty without someone to share it with. Loneliness teaches me that it’s the relationships, the love between people, that makes life really worth living.

And most of all, loneliness points me to God. Rich Mullins wrote a fantastic article called “never alone” that first pointed this stuff out to me (see http://www.kidbrothers.net & look for the Release magazine articles). He talked about how that each of us is so unique that no other human can ever fully understand us & that this is, in an odd sense, a good thing. It shows us that there is a part of our hearts that God, as the one who knows everything about us, has reserved for Himself alone. Our deepest cries for intimacy, the cries birthed often out of the depths of loneliness, are cries for a Saviour, a cry for Jesus to find us, to love us & to rescue us from our own self-destruction.

Loneliness comes, most of all, from the part of us that remembers Eden, that remembers the time where man & woman walked & talked with God in the garden & they were one… a unity of beings. God & humanity spoke face to face. Man & woman knew each other & could be naked without shame. Everyone knew & was known, loved & was loved…. And it was beautiful & perfect. And then, through humanity’s choice, sin entered the world & with it came loneliness and, like the angel with the flaming sword, both kept us from ever going back to Eden, kept us from finding the union we once knew, but it also pointed the way back to the One who would be the ‘Tree of Life’ (or the Life who would die on a ‘tree’ to give us eternal life). Loneliness keeps me longing for heaven, longing for that place where there are no more goodbyes, where it is not so hard to get to know others, where we don’t have to wear masks or put up walls, but we can trust,…. And the older I get, the more I long for such a place….

And so yeah, I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ loneliness here on planet earth. I’m not even sure if we want to totally solve it either, even if we could. I do know that we are called to learn how to love & part of that means finding others in their loneliness & bringing them into community, into friendship. Some of that means loving ourselves enough to try to get out there & be friendly in the hopes of finding/making friends. But yeah, loneliness drives us to intimacy & we must follow its lead. It’s dangerous to ignore loneliness, to try to drown it, numb it, in the pleasures of this world. So much of our entertainment culture is geared around making near contact, but not real closeness. Being an introvert who likes being quiet & absorbed in movies & never understand people’s need to see movies with other people, or why watching TV/movies with someone is ‘bonding’. It’s nice & I do it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a shared experience that may or may not help you understand each other better or make you feel less alone. Even in church we all ‘come together’ to basically sit there & sing together & listen to someone talk together, but really the ‘together’ is just that we’re all in the same room. It’s not that we are actually connecting with each other. Breathing the same air doesn’t really cut it for ‘togetherness’, sharing a heart does….

Loneliness pushes us to take risks, to risk learning how to love – or at least to recognize our need for love – and this is what’s really needed. In Matthew 9, Jesus sees all the crowds & sees their hurt, their longings, their desperation & he has compassion on then & turns to his disciples & says, “pray that the Lord of the harvest will send harvesters into the field ‘cause the harvest is ripe & ready to be picked.” What he’s really doing is asking these disciples to know Jesus’s heart, to see these people the way He sees them & to have compassion on them. The reason I figure this is ‘cause the disciples end up becoming the answer to their own prayers – God sends them as the first ‘harvesters’ into the ‘field’. And I think sometimes that this is why God calls us to prayer, so that we will start to see things the way He does & then start to go, “Oh, I can help there in this limited way”, and suddenly we find ourselves becoming the answers to our prayers, or the instrument through which God answers our prayers.

If we want to pray for people’s loneliness, we should pray with open arms & embraces, with warm smiles & “how are you?”s. We should pray with cups of coffee or shared meals. We should pray with smiles & laughter, shared secrets & tears. Our prayer should be not in word, as John says, but in actions, in deeds. Lots of prayer may fix loneliness or build community (& yep, the prayers are definitely needed), but it’s much better to bring love…. Though it’s way harder for the giver. It is easier to pray in the shelter of your room or your church than it is to get your hands dirty with the people of the world. To deal with all the fears & baggage & really whacked personality quirks & neurotic tendencies that come with lonely people like me…. Sometimes we’ve been ‘outside’ for too long & forget how to relate to others & so we’re kind of frustrating to deal with… but yeah, Jesus calls us to love, to get dirty, to touch, to hold, to be with those we are trying to love.

And yeah, on the flip side, for all of us lonely people: if we’re waiting for someone to come befriend us, we may be waiting a long time. It’s maybe better to follow the advice in proverbs that says “if you want friends, you should try being friendly first”. We may have to crash & burn & get shunned a number of times before we find real friends, but hey, the rejection stuff gets easier to deal with over time….and the real friends are out there (I think).

Lonely Tonight by Bryan Duncan, “Slow Revival” album

Don't belittle me, don't be light
Hear me truly and hear me right
I know You love me and I know You care
I know You're always there
But I'm lonely tonight

The sun has set in a misty grey
All the color has passed away
I watch the moon as it clears the wall
"Life is good," I'm sayin', "all in all,
But I'm lonely tonight"
Yeah, my faith is gonna see me through
You know I trust in You
But I'm lonely tonight

It's not a simple need for company
I don't know
where I belong in the world I see
and I'm lonely tonight

Rest assured in amazing grace
I'd feel safe in a safer place
It's true I love You and my love is true
You know I'm thankful, too
But I'm lonely tonight
I can gather all the power to choose
And I can take it if I win or lose
But I'm lonely tonight
I'm lonely tonight

I don't know
where I belong in the world I see
And I'm lonely tonight

A silhouette in a garden gate
A single prayer in a solemn state
A place for me I'm gonna recognize
Someday in paradise
'Cause I'm lonely tonight

Oh, it's not a simple need for company
I know now
that I don't belong in this world I see
And I'm lonely tonight
Lonely tonight
Lonely
Lonely
Tonight