When Loneliness Is Utterly Good

RESPECTFULLY yours, in the service of you, the reader, I submit my little thesis – God is the lord of the brokenhearted.

But that truth is only the start of it.

Loneliness can be an utterly good thing for the corners it forces us into; corners that compel us to break out into the world; corners that will convict us to draw ever closer to the God of our salvation; corners that teach us of the important things of life – those that seem beyond our awareness when life if easier.

But it wouldn’t be fair to go any further without climbing into the bubble of loneliness to demonstrate how much I get it.

A Personal Experience of Loneliness

Where is a good place to start? Grief is kin of loneliness, that I’m sure. Having had a life ripped from my grasp, and having been forced to adapt to a new life without either warning or choice; that was my reality. One life ended on September 22, 2003 and another one started on September 23, 2003. Neither life appeared even similar to the other. Fractured, overnight, was my failing character. I was broken and I needed to be – a truth I gradually became more comfortable with.

Many a night or Saturday morning I wept tears of bitter loneliness. I had a loving Para-church community around me, but there was a limit as to how much I could burden myself with them. Sometimes even loneliness is preferable.

Is there a more destructive antecedent to loneliness than rejection; I think not.

Yet, because I was a searcher – and faith was a necessity for me – I kept seeking God in my loneliest of troughs. I would search and seek and draw near, only to keel over when fatigue would finally overwhelm me. Many a night there was a sodden pillow trapped between my ear and the mattress.

Now enters the victorious irony of the starkest loneliness: it compelled me out of my door to face the world – out of desperation, to seek a solution of healing. It compelled me to draw nearer, ever, to God, my only hope. Pain, it is said by C.S. Lewis, is a megaphone getting our attention. Such a thing that deafens us makes us never more aware. To come close to the truth is a learning opportunity; let’s not begrudge God that.

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Loneliness compelled me out of my door to face the world – out of my desperation I had to seek a solution of healing. If not for the grief in my loneliness I would have lazily left life as it was – unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.