Too much time, thinkin’ ’bout all of my mistakes
My heart, my mind, my soul, my body aches
I hunger for the loving arms of your embrace
I walk along the lonely road -Erik Schrody
And you can be sure that I am always with you, to the very end. -Matthew 28:20
God has said, “I will never leave you. I will never desert you.” -Hebrews 13:5
I may not be breaking any news here, but in an overnight epiphany of clarity, it has occurred to me that human loneliness is the big problem. Look an any human problem in the world today, big or small, global or local, individual or corporate. It seems to me that evaluation of the root cause will lead us right into the lap of loneliness. From the Holocaust to the divorced couple down the street. If you dig deep enough, loneliness is at the core.
We are created to be social beings. We aren’t social in the sense of a beehive or an anthill, where each individual plays a small part in the wider society’s mechanism. Rather, we are social in the sense that we crave personal interaction. Newborns crave their nursing mother; students crave the disciplined instruction of a gifted teacher; we all crave friends and relationships.
Ever since the Fall, these social interactions we crave have been altered. They exist, and in many ways exist in good ways, but more often than not, our relationships end in loneliness, a great, tragic oxymoron. It’s my opinion that loneliness is the biggest sin of humanity. While it is a situation that many times is caused by ourselves and our own actions, it is something that as individuals we cannot fix by ourselves. A person, individually, can stop drinking, quit watching porn, and turn the other cheek instead of taking the last punch. Such changes have taken place countless times. But a lonely person cannot end it alone. And, therein lies the root cause of all sorts of bad.
Lonely–deeply lonely–people will do anything to alleviate it, to or relieve the blackness and emptiness in their souls, even if for a few fleeting moments. Addictions of all sorts, power trips, and distractions are taken on to escape loneliness, thus all other sins are based in loneliness, and are our reactions–however violent–against it.
Jesus is the end of loneliness, I believe. Like the verses say, he will never leave and he is always with me. Why then am I still lonely? Why are the great majority of people together on this rock overwhelmed in loneliness?
I don’t have any answers, just questions.
3 Comments
You have the answer “Jesus is the end of loneliness, I believe.”
I see people on cell phones and blackberries, and chat rooms and blogs, but man you hit it, this is a lonely culture. I think it was Driscoll talking about a missionary trip to a south east Asian country. Church started when everybody got there, to start before would be rude. that is community. We need community back in our churches, or really, why bother.
You are so right, bars are not just about booze, they are about lonely, drugs can be about lonely and so can gay.
No wonder you are the Miner, you dig pretty deep.
my family read this post together. We think you hit something big. We went down a list of people who have problems, yeah, you guessed it lonely. It is the plague of our time.
Thanks, Will. I really hate to take any credit, because it was really just a mind dump of something I had “figured out” about myself that week… kind of a therapy session. Loneliness explains a lot in my life, and as I think it through, like you say, it explains a lot in others’ lives as well.
I’m just glad what I wrote is being helpful to someone in my vast readership.