My heart went out to Geoff. Sitting on the couch across from me, he detailed the pain of coming home to an empty house each night, making a microwave dinner-for-one, and vegging for hours on Netflix or scrolling mindlessly on social media only to eventually veer toward darker corners of the internet. His face was drawn as he spoke, his words coming out slowly, as if with great effort, like a dental patient whose feeling was too slow in returning.

Geoff had initially sought out psychotherapy for addiction, as he knew God wanted better for him. It was the profound loneliness, though, that we explored as some of the genesis of his problematic behaviors, as if he were desperately running from the shadow over his life. It seemed that whatever he was using the numb the pain – and he had tried a lot of possibilities – he always ended up back in a place of emptiness. Clearly, running from the dark was no longer working for him, and he needed a new way to address the pain.

The ache that often arises in these moments of anxious striving or the dread of coming home to a cold and empty home (or lifeless marriage, or sick child, or dreary work, you name it) is often a deep need in our souls for something that connection provides. We need security, the sense that we’re not alone in the world, that we are cared for, provided for, invited in with someone kind and strong to a life that is planned for us. As psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson reminds us, “We come into the world looking for someone looking for us.” That ache has something to say to us, and tracing out its lines may lead us toward something we really need, maybe even something we are made for, rather than merely running away from it.

What if, instead of running from, numbing out, or compartmentalizing the experience of loneliness, we might instead try looking at it and listening to the ache within our hearts as we experience it? Psalm 16:7 says, “even at night my heart instructs me” (NIV). Now, I don’t know about you, but often what I hear from my heart at night, if I even tune in at all, is some sense of anxiety, like “Did I do okay today? How are the people doing that I love and try to care for? Will tomorrow go okay? Will I be able to tackle whatever it is that’s coming my way?” or some sense of shame, as in “I didn’t handle that very well. I wish I could have done better with that thing. I wonder if I’ll be able to outlive that embarrassment…” You know the drill.

But underneath the angst and anxious striving, if I really listen, lurks a deeper, darker fear. “Will I end up alone? What if I flub all of it and everyone abandons me?” Thinking back to Psalm 16, how in the world would that be counsel for me?

Geoff was profoundly disappointed in his life, and in God. Dropping his head into his hands, he could only say, “How did I end up here?” The pain of these disappointments was crushing. “There is a reason why life’s disappointments weigh so heavily on us,” John Eldredge wrote in the Sacred Romance. “They are whispers of a greater reality – something we were made for.”

Did you catch that? These disappointments are whispers.  Whispers of a greater reality. What reality might these disappointments be whispering to me about?

On a cold Spanish night in December 1577, a man named Juan de Yepes y Álvarez was imprisoned in a dank, dark, 6 feet by 10 feet cell. It was said that he had disobeyed his Carmelite religious order, and the 9-month imprisonment, replete with regular floggings, poor diet, and often no light or warmth, was to be his punishment. Juan spent hours upon dreaded hours alone, lying in his own filth, in the dark of his cold, empty cell.

We could have known nothing about Juan’s imprisonment, his life, or his deep devotion to God, except that for him in his isolation the “bonds of love” toward his Savior, as he would write, became most evident for him. Jesus became deeply real. The greater reality. In the isolated confines of his imprisonment, Jesus showed himself to Juan in profound ways. Juan would later become known as St. John of the Cross, a beloved figure of Christian history, and his A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom of Christ and Dark Night of the Soul, along with many other writings, would become some of the most read and oft-referenced in all of Christendom, encouraging those who knew Jesus to pursue Him deeper, and inviting those who did not to desire Him for the first time. It was for the isolated, imprisoned figure in the Spanish dungeon as it was for the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan when he wrote a few decades later, “Oh here, in dust and dirt, here the lilies of His love appear.”

We would be wise to ask of St. John how did he do it? What can we learn from St. John’s experiences? More to the point, how could we, like him, become securely bonded to Jesus (if he could in a dark, dank prison cell, perhaps we could through our own “dark nights”!) such that we might be able to listen to the counsel of the heart?

This is the space where Geoff was – remember him? He started to acknowledge that all of his running, all of his numbing, wasn’t working, and instead of redoubling his efforts to avoid the pain, he simply let it come. Not by himself, certainly not alone, but with a trusted companion in the dark he started exploring the inner recesses of his heart, tracing the pain and disappointments and trying to see them not only for what they were, but also for what they pointed toward. Here Geoff finally entered into the only honest thing the tension between his longing for connection on the one hand and the empty feeling that haunted him on the other could have called for: grief.

Geoff’s story is retold again and again in my office, by singles and couples alike. It is retold in my own life, and I suspect also in yours. Our loneliness is not a curse. It is not even something we are to fix or avoid. It is instead a breadcrumb trail leading us back home.  Jesus offers us a kind of intimacy both with Himself that are echoes of the intimate life we are made to enjoy. 

If C.S. Lewis was right when he said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” then we would do well to tune in.

Take a moment to consider this. Be honest here. When have you last felt the pang of loneliness, the sense of emptiness or disappointment that my life isn’t what I wanted it to be? For most of us, this comes up routinely, if we allow it. Henri Nouwen said that “the pain that often underlies our loneliness may be God’s way of inviting us to deeper intimacy with Him.”

Many of us feel alone even within community, especially when we have reason to fear vulnerability.

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1 Thompson, C. (2015) The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. InterVarsity Press.
2  Eldredge, John (2006). Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God. Thomas Nelson.
3 Vaughan, Henry. The Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist. vol II. E. K. Chambers, Ed. London, Lawrence & Bullen Ltd., 1896. 254.
4 Lewis, C.S. (2001). The Problem of Pain. HarperOne.
5 Nouwen, H.J.M. (1972). The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. Darton Longman and Todd.