When You Feel Lonely

Not long ago, I spoke for a conference with the theme “You Are Not Alone.”

Frankly, as I prepared for my time there, I realized that what I was writing was in danger of becoming cliché.

If we’re not careful, a lot of the assumptions we make as Christians have the smell of clichés.

For instance, “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so,” is true, but if you don’t have trouble believing it, you haven’t understood, and it’s just a cliché. It’s the same with forgiveness. God is a forgiving God, but if you aren’t aware of how desperately you need to be forgiven, what follows morphs into self-righteousness and becomes a cliché. If you worship an active and involved God but never expect him to intervene, your belief is just a cliché. That’s also true in our belief that God is the sovereign ruler, creator, and sustainer of all that is. That is who God is, but if that doesn’t scare the spit out of you on occasion, that truth becomes a cliché, too.

You are not alone.

Of course, you’re not alone. The Bible is clear about that. Jesus said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:18-20). And God said, “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8).

If my response to that truth is “But, of course” (and my response is often that), I’m moving away from experience into cliché territory. My late friend Jess Moody used to say that in some countries, without freedom of speech, people don’t say anything important. And in America, with our freedom of speech, we don’t say anything important either. There isn’t much difference. Just so about loneliness and never being alone. Unbelievers don’t believe God shows and feel like they are alone. Believers believe God shows and feel like God never shows. There isn’t much difference.

I have served as the pastor of three churches—one on Cape Cod, another in the Boston area, and one near Miami. The hardest thing about being the pastor in those churches was leaving. I cried when I left each church, and I fell apart preaching my final sermon in the last one. (If you say I said that, I’ll say you lied. Everybody knows that real men don’t cry.) I thought about the people I loved and how they shared their lives with me. I thought about the babies I baptized and watched them grow into faithful men and women. I thought of the many times I stood beside deathbeds, the suicides after which I cleaned up, the people who came to Christ, the changed lives, and the laughter and the tears, and it all got to me.

In the last church I served, I did what everybody said a pastor should do. I left and cut off relationships. Anna and I started attending another church, and I made a point not to contact the people I loved in the church where I had been the pastor. One Sunday, as we drove to church, Anna said, “You look sad. What’s wrong?” “I feel lonely,” I replied. “I feel really lonely.”

If I had known then what I know now, maybe I would have still felt lonely, but it would have been a different and better kind of loneliness. Let me share with you some things about loneliness that have helped me. Maybe it will help you, too.

First, God is lonely, too, and hates it. That’s surprising but true. It doesn’t mean that God is needy—he has no needs and can do quite well by himself—but he is lonely and doesn’t like it.

If Jesus is the source of our understanding of who God is (and he is), one thing that’s apparent about him is his loneliness. In John 6, people deserted Jesus, and then Jesus said to his disciples something filled with pathos (maybe one of the saddest things Jesus ever said), “Are you guys going to leave, too?” (Peter replied, “Are you crazy? Where are we going to go?”) And then, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was facing the cross, needing his friends to stand with him on his lonely trip there, and said, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me” (Matthew 26:38). Then he took Peter, James, and John with him while he prayed. They fell asleep not just once but three times. Jesus’ sad response breaks my heart, “Could you not watch with me one hour?”

The writer of Hebrews says that we have a high priest—Jesus—who is able to sympathize with us in the dark because he has been there and done that (Hebrews 4:15). So, it should be no surprise that Jesus’ Father knew, too. When we’re lonely, it’s a great comfort to know that God understands and hates it as much as we do. Jesus didn’t come just to keep us from being lonely but to be lonely in the same way we’re lonely.

We once interviewed a man fighting Alzheimer’s who wrote a book with an incredible title, I’m Beginning to Miss Me. When he was first diagnosed with the disease, Jesus said to him, “As you walk into the mist, I’ll go with you.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been scared, sinful, frustrated, and even angry and felt his loving presence. I’ve learned not to dismiss that as wishful thinking. He was really there. C.S. Lewis wrote that, even before he was a believer, he sensed someone watching him. That’s the way of Jesus.

Not only does God hate his loneliness, he is driven by it. That takes my breath away. God comes to us for our sakes, but he comes to us for his own sake, too. When John says, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), he’s making an important point. We don’t chase after God; he chases after us. That’s the nature of love.

I often speak of my father. While he was not a “good man” (he became a Christian shortly before he died), he was passionate and totally unconditional in his love for my brother and me. His love has defined God’s love for me. I’ve often thought that I was good to go if God loved me half as much as my father did. My father couldn’t have a party unless his sons were there. Jesus can’t either.

Let me share one other thing with you. Loneliness is hard, but it is also a gift. We experience it as a part of the created order. Jeremiah said that God said to him, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). The Psalmist said, “Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you” (Psalm 71:6). So, don’t complain about your loneliness; thank him for it. Hunger presupposes food, and thirst presupposes water. Just so, loneliness presupposes God. When Augustine said that our hearts were restless until they found their rest in God, he was talking about the gift of loneliness. He was simply restating the Psalmist, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1).

One of the most significant books in my life was written years ago by my late friend Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter. It was about her husband, Peter Marshall, the pastor of a prominent church in Washington and the chaplain of the Senate. While on vacation at their house on Cape Cod, Peter Marshall had a major heart attack and died on the way to the hospital. His last words were spoken to Catherine. As they took him to the ambulance, Peter took her hand, smiled, and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Those words, “I’ll see you in the morning,” took on a new and wonderful meaning for Catherine Marshall. They are also the words Jesus speaks to us, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. . . . I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you will be also” (John 14:1, 3). In other words, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Meanwhile, when you sense his presence, rejoice. But when you don’t sense his presence, rejoice in that, too. Thomas à Kempis prayed, “Sometimes thou dost withdraw thyself from us so that we might know the sweetness of thy presence.”

Bottom line, when you’re lonely, when you feel afraid, when you feel abandoned and think that nobody cares, it’s him. It’s a major sign of his presence and love for you.

He asked me to remind you.