Looking Into The Abyss

Solitude is difficult. Spending time alone can be miserable.  Emptiness overshadows us and surrounds us like a dark abyss that threatens to devour our souls. Most of us humans just hate this. We hate being alone. Even I tire of it and I love me some solitude. But someone I met many years ago wrote that it's OK to be lonely as long as you are free.

So how does that work? How can we make loneliness and emptiness and that dry ache of neediness work to our advantage?

There are many ways we can distract ourselves from our solitary lives. We can seek to fill the empty spaces with many things. Sexual immorality, drinking, drugs, sensationalist endeavors, pornography, social media. But do these really work? Are they lasting? From my experience I can tell you that these things do not fill the gap. They are temporary bandages on a ever gaping wound. So what's the answer?

I think we need to stare into that abyss, feel the pain and the misery and the emptiness that is loneliness and try to meet Jesus in that place so that He can fill it up. He will show us a way out, but we need to endure that pain in that process. It's the pain of the old self dying it's death. It's the pain felt as we dismiss old habits. It's like a period of mourning for what we are giving up to eventually gain something better. We have to let these things die and pass out of our lives so we can go where Jesus wants to take us in this life and the next.

Frederick Buechner said, "Our calling is where our greatest need and our greatest joy intersect." Jesus can help us find that intersection, but we have to be willing to meet Him in that awful abyss first, then let Him take up our pain and lead us there. Once we are aware of that calling, we can begin to thrive. We will truly be free. Loneliness may or may not be over, but it will bring a harvest of joy that makes it all much more tolerable.

Galatians 5:1
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

So where are you at today? Yes, I've been staring into that abyss. It's not as deep and dark as I thought it was.