Told by FennyI look like a lone wolf, and sometimes I feel like one too. Today I’m telling you what helps me then.
When we go to the park, there are dogs everywhere. They run, play, sniff each other. And sometimes I stand right in the middle of them and feel more alone than ever. That’s the strange thing about loneliness: it doesn’t have much to do with how many others are around you. You can be lonely in a full room and perfectly content alone on a bench.
When I first told Daisy, she asked quietly: “Even when I’m there?” I said: “Not with you. But otherwise, a lot.” And then came the sentence I hadn’t dared to say for a long time: “I thought I was the only one.”
You’re not the only one
That’s exactly what loneliness whispers to you: that everyone else belongs, except you. That everyone has friends who understand them, except you. In truth, an incredible number of people feel this way, they just don’t say it. And because nobody says it, everybody thinks they’re alone with it.
Back then Daisy answered: “Thank you for telling me. That’s brave.” Since then I know: talking about loneliness is the first step out of it.
Someone even wrote it down
There’s a prayer in the Bible that people hardly dare to say. David prays it, the king, the hero, the man with all the friends and warriors:
Turn to me, and have mercy on me, for I am desolate and afflicted.
No sugarcoating, no pious front. Just: “I am desolate.” In other words: I’m lonely. The Bible has room for that sentence. And that means you can say it to God just the same.
Nobody understands me?
Sometimes loneliness is something else too: the feeling that nobody understands what’s going on inside you. And often you can’t really explain it yourself.
You don’t have to. God understands what goes unsaid too. Psalm 139 says: “You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar” ✦Psalm 139:2✦. One sentence to God is enough: “This is how I’m doing right now.” God knows the rest.
And Jesus doesn’t only understand you from above, but from the inside. He was tired ✦John 4:6✦. He wept ✦John 11:35✦. The letter to the Hebrews says he can be “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” ✦Hebrews 4:15✦. The Greek word for this is sympatheō, where our word sympathy comes from. It means: to suffer with, to feel someone else’s pain alongside them. It appears only twice in the whole New Testament.
A promise for you
On the night before his death, at the last supper with his friends, Jesus gave them a promise. He knew they would soon feel very alone:
I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.
This promise is for you too. You’re not forgotten, not overlooked and not left alone.
One small step for today
Message one person today: “I was thinking of you.” That’s all. Often they feel just like you and haven’t dared to reach out either. Sometimes the best way out of your own loneliness is to make someone else’s a little bit smaller.
If loneliness gets very heavy and won’t go away, you don’t have to carry it alone. If you need support, someone to talk to, if you don’t want to be alone or have no one you could tell: in the US you can call or text 988, and in the UK Samaritans are there for you on 116 123, day and night. And wherever you are, findahelpline.com finds the right number near you.
I still stand around alone in the park sometimes, by the way. But then Daisy comes trotting over and sits down next to me. And I know: God took care of that too.
Bible quotations: World English Bible (public domain). Source on sympatheō: Bible Hub, Strong’s 4834.
