“Ain’t no man that good,” I quipped.
Everyone feels lonely at times. Truly good friends are rare and precious. I have book friends. Gym friends. Writing friends. Bible study friends. Hobby friends. Political friends.
But it is really hard to find friends that mix and match and connect in all those dots.
While we were living in Italy, my daughters flew back to college, found Jesus-loving-soul-mates and married them. I felt a bit like I’d lost my very best friends. But, they felt a bit like they’d finally been found.
One day, however, I got a call across the ocean.
“Mom,” my young-daughter-bride said, her voice held that kind of quiver a mom recognizes from babyhood. The kind that screws up their smooth faces into wrinkles, and fills their eyes with rivers. That kind. With an added tremble-on-the-bottom-lip, kind. I braced myself.
“I don’t want you to think anything is wrong with our marriage,” my young daughter-bride assured me.
Of course, I then imagined exactly that.
She went on to say, “I thought I wouldn’t miss my family so much after we were married. I thought I’d be ok with you there and me here, and I wouldn’t feel like something’s missing. But, I still miss you and Dad so much.”
And the tears began on both sides of the ocean. For I missed her like a severed piece of my being.
I breathed out a tremulous sigh of relief. I could sympathize.
“Ain’t no man that good,” I said, remembering a line I’d heard somewhere before.
We live in what some describe as a loneliness epidemic. Sure, technology, the breakup of the family, social media, overwork, and isolation are huge culprits. But the deep need in our souls has existed since the beginning of time.
In a beautiful garden, where the first man and woman already had perfection and each another, a serpent challenged their satisfaction. His slick and smooth question doubted the completeness of God.
“Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1b NKJV)
Surely, Satan implied, there must be more. God can’t be enough. How different the world would be if we recognized that nothing NOTHING else can ever satisfy like He does.
Loneliness comes in sizes, shapes, stages, and in tsunami waves. Like containers without lids, un-fillable, shapeless, and ageless. Loneliness spills emptiness into what we do, how we feel, and how we act.
When I moved to Italy, I left behind a group of my church friends. We were raising babies, doing Bible Studies, and figuring out married life together. I thought they were irreplaceable.
But when we moved back to the States, I missed my dear Italian friends who had crossed their own barriers to befriend this lonely American. I returned to the States, wearing a cloak of nearly 25 years of disconnection and distant miles. It felt heavy with layers of experiences I needed to tell with long bridges to cross, only to be met with glazed eyes.
Later I walked through two years of hospital corridors. Machines whirred, blinked, and buzzed. I longed for a friend to understand how it felt to have a daughter so ill. To live between here and there, life and death. I desired someone willing to meet me in my need without condemnation.
When loneliness comes, I tend to search for something, or some person to fill what my soul lacks, the holes that gape within. I can be quick to look in the wrong places. I mistake that feeling of loneliness for lack.
Maybe instead, it is a sign of mercy. Perhaps it is God’s repetitive voice saying, “I AM enough.”
Is it possible the Father ordains lonely seasons as gifts, so that we remember there is no person that is able to fill every nook and cranny of our emptiness?
How must it have been for the Son of God to exchange His heavenly home for one like our own? Surely such a loneliness had never before existed. He entered our world. Filled with dirt, mocking, and hurt. Yet, he forged friendships and offered love to the undeserving. He bent down and became our Friend.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13 ESV)
How vulnerable we become when we feel the deepest loneliness of our souls. We delve into books, philosophies, me-isms, ideologies, shopping, wrong relationships, and maybe even chocolate.
God calls us in our loneliness to know His friendship.
Today I find myself in a lonely space. And I go through my mental listings of who to talk with to unburden my heart. In my searching, I remember a young daughter-bride from a long time ago, with a tremor in her voice, and a wish for someone that could fill her emptiness. God calls us in our loneliness to know His friendship. Share on X
The memory brings me to sit in quietness with an open Bible. It reminds me that alone can be a mercy because in that space I remember I’m not actually alone. It puts me where Jesus sits with me. It offers a place to listen and hear His voice.
He speaks to my heart in alone-stillness. He lifts His voice from the pages on my lap. He says, “I hear. I see. I am enough. I am that Good.”
How humbled I am that He would choose me to be His friend.
If you love the hymn He Will Hold Me Fast, you will be interested in the article I wrote for GodTube.
GodTube (https://www.godtube.com/popular-hymns/he-will-hold-me-fast/)
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