I so appreciate this, Lore. I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness, and my own (surprising) enjoyment of being alone in this season--more than ever before. I’m asking questions about what is at the root of my more frequent desire to be alone, and where God is situated in this moment...
This was so good. I dealt with loneliness when I moved away from my very dear friends after college, and it was so hard to develop new community in my new place. What stands out to me from that time is how God always provides His manna, through Himself primarily and through the gift of the right people at the right time. I started to realize how much I had been relying on other people to fill me up, when only He is the well of living water. He drew me to Himself and taught me (an extrovert) how to be alone, but also how to reach out to others from a place of freedom and wholeness. I made myself do things alone and discovered there was a lot more beauty in doing them alone than I thought. I’ll use a quick example of going to a museum where I ended up praying for a while afterwards, which I would not have done if the friend who was supposed to come had been able to attend. We would have been talking and I would not have had the space to sit with the Lord and process my thoughts about the exhibit.
What a beautiful essay/post! One of the first times I wrestled with loneliness in my life was during my first overseas posting. Directly out of college, and I was halfway around the world all by myself! I wasn’t used to living by myself, wasn’t used to spending evenings by myself etc...I don’t remember who told me this, but I was encouraged to reframe the loneliness as solitude. Solitude being a more positive word/experience and often a chosen one versus one you find yourself in. While this isn’t always appropriate, it reframed my experience into a positive thing, then allowed me to invited Jesus into that space, invite reflection, connection with my emotions, and helped me cultivate a comfortableness with myself. That experience was profound for me. It didn’t solve all future struggles with loneliness but definitely helped me to have a different lens to view the feeling with.
Raised in cessationism and accepting Christ in childhood in a family with 6 children, I too thought there would never be enough alone time. I am an introvert, and being alone energizes me. But at the advanced age of 55 I was cursed by my new husband, saying, “you will be alone” on the occasion I confessed to him that being alone at the end of life was a great fear of mine. Good riddance to him, and the words of his curse rang in every day of the year.
Then, in a quest to learn how to hear from the Lord, I found the opposite of cessationism in church, and began the pursuit of that knowledge.
Pursuing the message of the Lord directed to me, and learning to hear it, I found first this fear of being alone waned gradually, and then, lo and behold! As Lore said, HE was present with me. My constant companion. The one with whom that knowing look passed when something that is part of our inside story is spoken. The one I can be silent in the room with as we each rock in our chairs. The one I laugh with and cry with and exclaim with. He has filled that space.
I have not written off marriage. I still lack the life-giving of physical touch, but I am jealous of my time with Him and the freedom I have there. I don’t want it disrupted or slowed or retarded.
Thank you Lore. As an oldish person, I find so much of my younger self and also my present self in so much of what you present so eloquently. I also believe I’m a 9 on the enneagram and I’m curious as to other older 9’s , if by being older,
that some of the longings to be seen, being oriented to the past in the way I think and seeing both sides at times, are evolving into accepting certain patterns and beliefs in others that once ruffled me.
Maybe what I’m trying to express is that with time and seeing through hopefully better grace- filled lenses than I ( personally speaking here)did in my younger days, I don’t let what others assign or exhibit( hospitality for instance) to either intimidate me or sadden me because of thinking differently than those I once did think like.
(Or I thought that I should think alike.)
I love that you point us towards accepting who we all are :uniquely made and beloved by Christ.
Your influence to look to Him and remember that is encouraging me. Thank you!
I love this. I started therapy 6 months ago and the thing we keep coming back to is that I feel the safest and most myself when I'm alone. I'm learning that embracing and fulfilling that deep need for aloneness gives me more energy to pour into the people in my life.
I, too, have tried to force myself to embrace the hospitality I grew up over-spiritualizing, but it burns me out so quickly. I've been working to let go of that burden and, like Lore has been discussing, allow God to be hospitable to how I've been formed. I've been formed as an autistic woman who absorbs every emotion and sensation available to my brain.
Though I'm learning how to regulate and soothe my body from the overwhelm of this constant barrage, I will always be more sensitive and, therefore, more easily exhausted when I'm exposing myself to people and high sensory environments.
There are days when I resent this part of myself because I want to be a person who leaves the world a better place, but I remind myself that giving back in small, quiet (perhaps even infrequent) ways is still giving. God can multiply small portions, if He chooses, and that frees me from having to force my life to be louder and fuller than would be good for my soul.
I feel similarly about leaving the world a better place, but one thought I keep having is: what if the way I can leave the world a better place is to be me and not to be someone else? To embrace the good fruit of my God-made personality and trust God is doing something with it, even if it isn't as visible as it might be for those who are more visible or social or vocal?
I'm so new to learning to like myself that this concept still feels fragile for me...but I do think this is one of the keys to being a human creature, one who is content to have been created in a certain way and who trusts that their very existence is a kind of good from God. It's surprisingly difficult for me to live this way, but I think it's a critical journey. I so appreciate how you model this.
You said it all so well! I've gone through my own battles with loneliness, and your post agrees with everything I've learned along the way. Connection with God and comfort with one's own self must come before connection with others.
I like to be by myself. My loneliness in recent years has been philosophical, for lack of a better way to express it. I have two, real-life, like-minded friends. One I rarely see, and one lives far away. I went from living in a place where I felt for the most part like these are my people to feeling like these are not my people, and if they knew what I really think and believe (how I vote!) they would have nothing to do with me. I feel this way because it happened. A family we were good friends with canceled us, and we were essentially run out of our church. I agree with you about friendship with Jesus being the key to survival and, ultimately, to flourishing.
I so appreciate this, Lore. I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness, and my own (surprising) enjoyment of being alone in this season--more than ever before. I’m asking questions about what is at the root of my more frequent desire to be alone, and where God is situated in this moment...
This was so good. I dealt with loneliness when I moved away from my very dear friends after college, and it was so hard to develop new community in my new place. What stands out to me from that time is how God always provides His manna, through Himself primarily and through the gift of the right people at the right time. I started to realize how much I had been relying on other people to fill me up, when only He is the well of living water. He drew me to Himself and taught me (an extrovert) how to be alone, but also how to reach out to others from a place of freedom and wholeness. I made myself do things alone and discovered there was a lot more beauty in doing them alone than I thought. I’ll use a quick example of going to a museum where I ended up praying for a while afterwards, which I would not have done if the friend who was supposed to come had been able to attend. We would have been talking and I would not have had the space to sit with the Lord and process my thoughts about the exhibit.
Wow! I love that story about the museum, this is exactly what I found too!
This is remarkably helpful. Thank you Lore
What a beautiful essay/post! One of the first times I wrestled with loneliness in my life was during my first overseas posting. Directly out of college, and I was halfway around the world all by myself! I wasn’t used to living by myself, wasn’t used to spending evenings by myself etc...I don’t remember who told me this, but I was encouraged to reframe the loneliness as solitude. Solitude being a more positive word/experience and often a chosen one versus one you find yourself in. While this isn’t always appropriate, it reframed my experience into a positive thing, then allowed me to invited Jesus into that space, invite reflection, connection with my emotions, and helped me cultivate a comfortableness with myself. That experience was profound for me. It didn’t solve all future struggles with loneliness but definitely helped me to have a different lens to view the feeling with.
Raised in cessationism and accepting Christ in childhood in a family with 6 children, I too thought there would never be enough alone time. I am an introvert, and being alone energizes me. But at the advanced age of 55 I was cursed by my new husband, saying, “you will be alone” on the occasion I confessed to him that being alone at the end of life was a great fear of mine. Good riddance to him, and the words of his curse rang in every day of the year.
Then, in a quest to learn how to hear from the Lord, I found the opposite of cessationism in church, and began the pursuit of that knowledge.
Pursuing the message of the Lord directed to me, and learning to hear it, I found first this fear of being alone waned gradually, and then, lo and behold! As Lore said, HE was present with me. My constant companion. The one with whom that knowing look passed when something that is part of our inside story is spoken. The one I can be silent in the room with as we each rock in our chairs. The one I laugh with and cry with and exclaim with. He has filled that space.
I have not written off marriage. I still lack the life-giving of physical touch, but I am jealous of my time with Him and the freedom I have there. I don’t want it disrupted or slowed or retarded.
He is more than enough.
Thank you Lore. As an oldish person, I find so much of my younger self and also my present self in so much of what you present so eloquently. I also believe I’m a 9 on the enneagram and I’m curious as to other older 9’s , if by being older,
that some of the longings to be seen, being oriented to the past in the way I think and seeing both sides at times, are evolving into accepting certain patterns and beliefs in others that once ruffled me.
Maybe what I’m trying to express is that with time and seeing through hopefully better grace- filled lenses than I ( personally speaking here)did in my younger days, I don’t let what others assign or exhibit( hospitality for instance) to either intimidate me or sadden me because of thinking differently than those I once did think like.
(Or I thought that I should think alike.)
I love that you point us towards accepting who we all are :uniquely made and beloved by Christ.
Your influence to look to Him and remember that is encouraging me. Thank you!
I love this. I started therapy 6 months ago and the thing we keep coming back to is that I feel the safest and most myself when I'm alone. I'm learning that embracing and fulfilling that deep need for aloneness gives me more energy to pour into the people in my life.
I, too, have tried to force myself to embrace the hospitality I grew up over-spiritualizing, but it burns me out so quickly. I've been working to let go of that burden and, like Lore has been discussing, allow God to be hospitable to how I've been formed. I've been formed as an autistic woman who absorbs every emotion and sensation available to my brain.
Though I'm learning how to regulate and soothe my body from the overwhelm of this constant barrage, I will always be more sensitive and, therefore, more easily exhausted when I'm exposing myself to people and high sensory environments.
There are days when I resent this part of myself because I want to be a person who leaves the world a better place, but I remind myself that giving back in small, quiet (perhaps even infrequent) ways is still giving. God can multiply small portions, if He chooses, and that frees me from having to force my life to be louder and fuller than would be good for my soul.
I feel similarly about leaving the world a better place, but one thought I keep having is: what if the way I can leave the world a better place is to be me and not to be someone else? To embrace the good fruit of my God-made personality and trust God is doing something with it, even if it isn't as visible as it might be for those who are more visible or social or vocal?
I'm so new to learning to like myself that this concept still feels fragile for me...but I do think this is one of the keys to being a human creature, one who is content to have been created in a certain way and who trusts that their very existence is a kind of good from God. It's surprisingly difficult for me to live this way, but I think it's a critical journey. I so appreciate how you model this.
You said it all so well! I've gone through my own battles with loneliness, and your post agrees with everything I've learned along the way. Connection with God and comfort with one's own self must come before connection with others.
I like to be by myself. My loneliness in recent years has been philosophical, for lack of a better way to express it. I have two, real-life, like-minded friends. One I rarely see, and one lives far away. I went from living in a place where I felt for the most part like these are my people to feeling like these are not my people, and if they knew what I really think and believe (how I vote!) they would have nothing to do with me. I feel this way because it happened. A family we were good friends with canceled us, and we were essentially run out of our church. I agree with you about friendship with Jesus being the key to survival and, ultimately, to flourishing.
Mine too, the philosophical loneliness thing.
Wow. Thank you for this. Putting words to so many crises (many internal) that I've not known how to bare.