Loneliness and the Call to Four Relationships

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Loneliness speaks to how we are made for relationship. It tells us how incomplete we are without each other. It speaks to the blessing and the pain of sincere connection. We are lonely for time and space with ourselves, to rest, to restore, create, imagine, pray, and to move about.

We are lonely for others, those who we can see into and they into us, allowing us to have the connection of intimacy. Loneliness brings us to the experience of “into-me-see”—intimacy. Intimacy is birthed in the gift of the feeling of loneliness, which pushes us to be known. Good things in this life happen to those who are known from the inside out.

We are also lonely for God, his presence in our lives. We hunger to experience the touch of relationship with God. We are created by God to have a relational experience of God and a life of living as God created. We are image bearers of God, and our need for relationship is an expression of that image bearing.

We are also created with a fourth expression of loneliness and a need for fulfillment that it prompts. We are lonely for expression of our creativity. We are created to have relationship with the earth, to tend, make and create out of it that which connects us to creation and creating. We are made to create as a form of fulfillment.

Far from being our enemy, loneliness prompts us to move from how we are created towards who we are created to become. We are made for relationship. Loneliness is a gift that moves us towards the fulfillment of intimacy with our selves, others, God, and the earth. Good things happen to people who are known, even as we struggle in the midst of pain and difficulties. 

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