A Battle With Loneliness - Guest Post

Hey everyone! I'll catch you all up soon on what's happening here with the lockdown, etc., but in the meantime I thought you would enjoy reading this guest post by my friend, Claire. We spend a lot of time talking and reading books together, and we both enjoyed this one that she talks about here. I asked her if she would write something for my blog, and she decided to write on the topic of loneliness. I imagine this is timely for many people as so many are stuck at home right now.

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Everyone feels lonely sometime in their life. Some do more than others, but I don’t think any of us are exempt from the feeling.

I have struggled with great loneliness.

At the early age of eleven, I started boarding school and for the first time I can remember, I was struck by an intense feeling of loneliness. Not knowing a single person at the school, I felt terribly alone. Being bullied for a lot of my school life, I kept trying to fill my loneliness with friends, but each time I felt let down. 

Later I started to believe that the reason for my loneliness was rooted in my singleness. I thought that my loneliness would be solved by having a boyfriend or by being married. I came to realize that this was, in fact, a lie - that even when I was in a relationship, I still felt incredibly lonely. That relationship was sinfully motivated and as a result of the relationship, I pushed all of the people I called friends away. 

Once that relationship had ended, and through the help of biblical counselling, I realized that I didn’t have any real friends.  I then thought that it was because of the stunning lack of real friends in my life, that I was so lonely. But again even when I did start to make real friendships, even biblical ones, I still could feel lonely. And being apart from friends for long periods because of school holidays created times of intense loneliness again.

After speaking to a friend about my struggles, she recommended Lydia Brownback’s book, Finding God in Your Loneliness. Each chapter was about a different possible reason for being lonely. As I read it seemed like Lydia had been able to watch my whole life unfold and somehow gained access to my brain, because it seemed that each chapter described every way that I had ever felt lonely, some that I had never even realized. It was painful to read, but also comforting in a way - I was not the only one who struggled with loneliness. From this book, I learned that I will never stop feeling lonely all together for the rest of my life, but that the trick was a change of perspective.

The book spoke about how Jesus was lonely for most of His life too. He was apart from the Father for His whole life on Earth - yes, He did have times where He communed with the Holy Spirit -  but He was never with God the Father and the Holy Spirit like He was before he came to Earth. Jesus was sinless in a sinful world surrounded by sinful people. He would have had a difficult time making friends with others who could see how vastly different they were from Him (and probably hated Him for it). "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). How alone He must have felt not having a single person who could ever understand His pain or the pain that He knew He would have to bear on the Cross! And think of the Cross, how alone He must have felt! He even felt forsaken by the Father (Matthew 27:46). Jesus could be considered the loneliest person to ever live. So we can take comfort that Jesus knows what it's like to feel lonely and that we have a High Priest that can sympathize with us (Hebrews 4:15). And we can go to Him for comfort that He provides abundantly so that we can also comfort others because we have been comforted by the Father (2 Corinthians 1:4-8).

Brownback also describes how because of Jesus’s sacrifice, we are now called citizens of Heaven (Ephesians 2:19). Just as Jesus experienced loneliness because of being apart from His true home, we also will feel lonely here on Earth as Christians, because this is not our real home. We will never fully be in the Lord’s presence here on Earth, but praise God that He has promised that one day we will be. 

I am learning that I cannot try to fully satisfy my loneliness in any kind of relationship with people  because God has created me so that He fulfills that desire in me.

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I am also learning that in times when I can feel the loneliness creeping into my mind, I can remind myself that Jesus understands this feeling and was still without sin because He kept his mind on the Father and on what was to come. I can shift my thoughts from myself and my loneliness to Christ’s sacrifice and to what God is still going to do in the future when we are fully with Him and we will be fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

A point to remember, however: Brownback points out that while we are here still God has graciously given the Church to fill that need, to a degree. It is not to replace Him, but there is definitely a comfort through fellowship with biblical friends. Even though we are still sinners and we hurt and sin against each other, we can still be lonely less often by building friendships with other people in the Church, pointing one another to Christ and reminding each other of truth  - of where our true home is.