Filling the hole of loneliness without love

I’ve had my share of conversations with counsellees that go like this: “So, what do you think drives the lust that you cannot control?” “Oh, that’s easy. I feel there’s a loneliness deep down inside me that nothing can satisfy.” And I say, “That’s a grief that only one thing can fill.”

Filling the hole of loneliness without love is the futility of using any number of ten thousand things to do what only God in his wisdom can. But we don’t go to God, do we?

We don’t go to God because doing that involves going into our pain.

God is a doorway through which we’re required to walk. God is on the other side of the threshold, and we get to the other side by faith. But nothing drives us over that line, or across that divide, without a big push by hope, and that’s inspired by a desperation, where the pain of entering God is less than a pain of where we’re presently at.

Starting the journey of grief is wisdom, but it is also the wanton surrender unto death. Nobody goes that journey through that door unless they’re utterly sick and tired of being sick and tired. The journey through that door to the other side is potentially years long, but every endurance of pain is worth it over the long haul. No matter the presence of those promises on the other side, however, the very thought of that view through the doorway is positively sickening. It’s enough to cause us to involuntarily heave.

What the pain of grief teaches us in it is God’s presence, but never as an accompanying fact. It’s only afterwards, by the revelation of those footprints in the sand, that we realise just how faithful God is to carry us when we could walk no further, even though we thought at that time it was us, ourselves, that was doing it our way, thinking God was derelict of duty, AWOL when he promised to never leave us nor forsake us.

It’s only afterwards that we discover the irrefutable reality that God is there, everywhere, with us. Afterwards, and only then.

The pain involves many tears, many horrid lonely nights, and many repetitive questions that went unanswered. The pain created despair many times worse than we thought was even possible; pain we could hardly bear. The pain we resented at the time actually took us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. The pain that threatened to destroy us actually became the vehicle to the knowledge of God. The pain that we could not have borne on ourselves alone taught us our identity. This pain brought us to our knees in the sight of God, and from there we discovered how to fill that hole called loneliness with love. Yet that pain, though we’d never do it again (well, that’s what we say!), took us more deeply into inexplicable mystery than we could ever understand, and still we learn that somehow it was intrinsically part of our destiny. God had his purpose in it.

That pain that we hated so much, as we were crushed there in it, took us deep into the heart of God, and from there, God took our heart and healed it.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash