Embracing Your Existential Loneliness for Healing

FOLLOWING on from the previous piece — When Loneliness Meets God — I have found something contemptible in my existence.

When I sit down and stare into space there is a loneliness that fills my heart. When I am devoid of activity and simply sit there and be, I am faced with my own mortality and being. I am faced with a person I cannot get away from. And I am at once both troubled and relieved. It is a surreal experience, that experience of existence.

Tapping into this experience, though it might sound anachronistic, given we live so we might as well live, is fundamental to knowing who we are; we need God.

When we know we need God we then have no reason to hide from anything. Even the darkness, in all its vicissitude, cannot scare us when we have nothing to hide from.

Most of us want the power to be able to engage freely with anyone. Engage with God, authentically, and engage with yourself, truly, and there you have it. We then have the capacity to look anyone in the eye with the want to be there!

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A certain sense for loneliness follows us all through the lifespan. It is not an unhealthy thing to know that we are missing something. Even when we believe in God, that missing piece is not given to us. We wait upon a final redemption when all things are made new. Until then we carry about in our bodies this loneliness that the mind must grapple with, if our mind is to live abiding to what it must wrestle with.

If we love God we will love truth.

God has infused a longing in us to know him (Ecclesiastes 3:11). To deny him is to deny our loneliness, and to deny our loneliness is to deny our very selves.

The key to healing is to endure the pain of the loneliest moment. If loneliness cannot scare us, because we know and can access God, then nothing can threaten us.

It is up to us to embrace a thing that we cannot change as we live and breathe.

God gives us the fortitude and the reason to do it.

We sit and wait in a quiet moment with ourselves. And God affirms what we are doing. “I am in you,” says the Lord, by his Spirit. “I am in you, so take heart, for the best is still yet to come!”

© 2015 Steve Wickham.