The scariest part of loneliness is the knowledge is that it will never go away. You will feel lonely again, no matter what. You will be empty and no amount of food will fill you. You will be cold no matter how many blankets you wrap up in. And one day, your skin will ache for human contact so badly that you will, almost involuntarily, collide with someone at the mall, office, skybridge. One of my devotionals from this summer said "To be human is to be lonely." It also pointed out that certain people, especially artists, "are probably, to some degree, lonely all the time."

It really doesn't ever go away, there is always some barrier. Pain is a great one for getting in the way, but sometimes they are good things. The day you realize that you are not your best friend's best friend is always a cold one. Honestly, if you ever meet someone who will always choose you over every other person, every time, you haven't made a friend, you've made a stalker. Stalkers wouldn't be so bad, except that they only take, there is no input from them, even if you're having dinner. Eventually, you will have nothing to give and the loneliness returns. Marriage isn't the solution, for sure.

And God forbid you should tell anyone at church about this problem. Let's be honest, if you ever feel lonely, you clearly don't have a strong enough relationship with the Lord. I mean, if an omnipresent yet invisible being who regards taking on physical form as a kind of humiliation doesn't fill your days with company and good times, nothing will. And don't even try to defend your loneliness with the Gospel because every good Baptist knows that when Jesus said "Father, why have you forsaken me?" it was a rhetorical point about God's holiness, not the desperate cry of a profoundly lonely man. Now, go read 'The Purpose Driven Life', say three "Prayer of Jabez"s and sin no more.

Imagine what you would say if a friend called you and said "Can we hang out? I'm just feeling really lonely right now." Now, try to say it yourself. Make yourself say that sentence out loud. Realize just how vulnerable you are when you cry out for another human being. Because, eventually, you're going to have to. Cynicism aside, God never meant for our relationship with him to be all-satisfying. Remember the part where he created Eve? Remember how that happened before sin entered the world? And if you feel like I'm attacking you, just know that I used to think loneliness was a sign of spiritual weakness, a symptom of the sin nature. I also tried to commit suicide three times before my nineteenth birthday.

Loneliness and I are old acquaintances. The strange thing is, it seems like the more my heart longs for the Lord's and my feet for his path, the closer loneliness is to me, the more frequently he visits. The more I recognize my gifts, the more fervently I chase the purposes to which they guide me, the more I seek the person God designed me to be; the more often I find myself feeling desperately lonely. Loneliness which gives way to depression, which really just makes you want to hide from everyone.

I wish this was written in ink, so you could count how many tears this note has cost me. Also know that my roommate is not tagged because all this is still too hard to say to someone I live with.

So, what's the point of all this? Vulnerability. What part of himself did our savior keep from us? Don't worry about how much you keep from him, not now. Ask how much of yourself you keep from other believers. How much of you do you protect? If you can break as completely as our Lord did, if you can keep nothing from the fellowship of believers, you will have nothing held back from the Lord, either. "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you have done to me also." Once you're vulnerable, once you're broken, before God and man then to that same degree will you be available to serve God and men.

Seeds are wonderful things, unless they never open. A seed that won't open is useless.