How to View Loneliness as a Gift

It doesn’t feel like a gift, and most of us would prefer not to receive it. Yet, there it is daily, staring us in the face. Might this be a “daily bread” prayer to God? What if we asked Him for the grace to choose to view loneliness as a gift from Him?

You may say, but I don’t like the feeling of loneliness! I agree. But do you like the feeling of hunger or thirst? We generally don’t want them, but we are thankful for them. While uncomfortable, they urge us toward what we need. If someone has no appetite or a sense of dehydration, that person is in a health crisis. Hunger and thirst cause us to seek the satisfaction of those desires. Loneliness is relational hunger. It sits in the pit of our souls uncomfortably. We can ignore it, distract it, satisfy it sinfully, resent it, or hate it. The key is to leverage it by seeing it as a gift and responding to it rightly.

What does that look like? Loneliness creates internal energy. It is a strong emotion. I respond to it negatively, and even sinfully, by coping with the pain in sinful or destructive ways. Or I can leverage that energy as motivation toward a more profound engagement with God and others. This requires disciplines and self-control as my flesh urges self-destructive responses.

The United States continues to suffer from incidents of mass shootings and murder. After the event, authorities investigate why the shooters do such terrible evil. The common denominator of most mass shooters is that they are loners. Their alienation from relationships that would be life-giving to them causes them to take loneliness energy and use it tragically and destructively.

Christian theology explains “why” our internal desires so easily weaponize loneliness.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:16–17).

Loneliness creates internal energy.

The flesh is our remaining nature, our “indwelling sin.” It is a lingering spiritual enemy within that seizes upon any opportunity, temptation, or habit of life and weaponizes it against us and God’s good purpose in us. It is critical to understand how our internal enemy works. Our flesh is an active force seeking our spiritual pain and sorrow. It hates God and will apprehend the slightest prick of loneliness and seek to amplify it into bitterness, jealousy, and resentment.

Once loneliness enters the lower side of our nature, viewing it as a gift is very difficult as it produces the worst of human emotions. Embedded in unhealthy loneliness is the fear that we will always feel this way. Just as hunger can devolve into gluttony and thirst weaponized into alcoholism, loneliness is easily weaponized within us.

Pascal rewinds loneliness to its source:

What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

What Pascal describes as a hole in our heart, Augustine famously said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”7 If this chapter discourages you, realize the natural you, by yourself, cannot turn loneliness into a blessing. It is always a curse and a scourge. For some, they isolate themselves in the wilderness, literally or figuratively. Others take their hurt out in violent and tragic ways.

The story of humanity is how much the hole in the heart hurts. How can we fill it? How can we find Augustine’s rest? The tale of loneliness is intertwined with the story of redemption. The gospel is God’s ultimate solution to our loneliness.