It’s Because of Me That I Feel Alone So Much

SOCIAL media has helped me to find a way into a lonely and dejected place.

As I look at the connections I don’t have, and even as I criticise myself for the people I’ve unfriended, because I never heard from them, I find myself lonely.  Then there’s the friends I don’t have; those I’ve never been friends with; those I don’t know (but wish I did).  I find myself lonely.  I find myself ostracised by myself.  And even though many of the people I look at have never rejected me, I find myself rejected by them, because I’m susceptible to rejection.

Now Facebook is not the problem.  Hear me.  Facebook is not the problem.  I am.  But that’s not even the end of the story.  It alludes to a great beginning.

You see I’ve always been susceptible to rejection.  Always.  In meeting Jesus, and in meeting myself, and in accepting myself as a broken man in great need of God, I have come face to face with a woeful reality — I am an awfully insecure man without him; but I’m unashamedly broken and confidently fallible in him.  See the discrete difference?

I hid from my susceptibility to rejection for years.  It seemed to have no cost, but it costed me dearly.  It costed me a marriage, but worse.  It costed me the failure of not being able to fully love a wife who needed my love.  I was not the father I could have been.  I had to realise that the thing I feared most stood as the doorway into salvation; the very thing I feared was to become God’s magnum opus in me.

My brokenness is the reason I’m whole.  And all it cost me to be blessed was to admit the truth: I need Jesus, because without him truth is too raw.  Actually, because I know Jesus, nothing about me is that bad that I can’t look it square in the face, and without judgment.  Jesus despatches fear!  Jesus equips us to live our reality.  Nothing else can.

Yet I still endure life in the body and as my flesh rots slowly in ageing I’m reminded that, even though I’m free in Christ, I still live with loneliness of envying relationships I don’t have because of my susceptibility to rejection.  And yet, again, I can write these words as if ‘who cares who knows how empty a person I am’!  I’m unafraid of the truth.  That’s Jesus’ power; evidence of the Holy Spirit.

***

Rejection — the perception of being or having been rejected — causes loneliness.  In loneliness there’s the projection of isolation.  Men are so easily isolated.  Women are too, but I’ve learned that more women than men are prepared to be vulnerable.  I have a passion deep within me to share what freedom there is in casting the anchor of pretension from the ship Intrepid without the chain attached.  Men, you are all beautiful.

***

It’s because of me that I feel alone so much.  But it’s because of Jesus that I’m an instant escapee.  I’m only lonely for as long as it takes me to be aware of what’s missing: Him.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.