On Being Alone
ON BEING ALONE
by Brian Donovan
One of the great fears of man, from the cradle to the grave, is to be left alone. This fear is found in the infant who will cry until he is picked up and held, the teenager who is committing suicide (at a rate of 6,000 per year), the middle aged person who longs to return to the 1950’s rather than face today, and the elderly who, all over this country, must face days or even weeks without seeing anyone.
According to the psychologists, the way to keep from being lonely is to make friends, yet their own studies show that the loneliest group in the world is made up of urban, high school senior girls. Do you know of anyone with more friends than a high school girl? I’m afraid that “making friends” has nothing to do with loneliness. In 1952, the Saturday Evening Post did a story on a woman they billed as, “The Loneliest Woman in America.” Dorothy Molter, a seventy-nine year old woman, lived alone in a million acre wilderness in northern Minnesota for fifty-six years. Her response to the story? “I haven’t been lonely a day in my life.” I guess the Saturday Evening Post didn’t know the difference between being alone and being lonely.
For the Christian, there is a blessing as well as a curse to be found in being alone. Any child of God ought to have such a relationship with his Father in heaven so as to get excited at the thought of time alone. I know that last sentence sounds crazy in today’s society of TV, radio, telephones, VCR’s, etc., but tell me, how else do you expect to get to know someone without spending some time alone with them? The problem may be that you don’t want to get to know the Lord Jesus Christ too well because you know that His thoughts are not your thoughts (Isa. 55:8). One of the strongest tools of Satan is to keep you on a tight, busy schedule so you won’t have any time to think. He knows that if you should ever sit down and actually think, you might look ahead to the Judgment Seat of Christ and DO something about it.
Depending on how you use the time alone, it can become either a curse or a blessing. Let’s look at the curse of being alone. In Psalm 10:4, the Bible says that “The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.” When the Lord is not the center of all your thoughts, time alone is a curse. When your thoughts are always centered on YOU and YOUR problems, it leads to every sin imaginable (selfishness, vengeance, hatred, strife, drunkenness, etc.). Since your heart is wicked (Jer. 17:9), and your thoughts are vain (Psa. 94:11), it is obvious that you cannot let your daydreaming go on unchecked, or it will only lead to sin. The sin doesn’t come from being alone, but from a man allowing too much freedom to a wicked heart that will draw you away in your own lusts, which bringeth forth sin (James 1:14-15). In Genesis 6-9, the reason for the flood was not because men were alone, but because they multiplied and got together (Gen. 6:1). The same was true at the tower of Babel. They got together and thought to reach heaven through pride, because they were afraid of being scattered (Gen. 11:4). What is wrong with being scattered? If you are afraid of being alone, it is because you haven’t learned the blessing of spending time with the great God and our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
It is going to take work on your part if you are to find a blessing in being alone. You aren’t going to be able to just sit back and “think beautiful thoughts,” especially when everything around you is falling apart. If you want a clean and pure thought life, it must start with the word of God. The context of the Lord’s promise of His words not returning void (Isa. 55:11), has to do with your thoughts (look at verses 7 and 8). If you will pour the word of God into your mind, you will begin to be able to think like He thinks and something will be accomplished that pleases Him (verse 11). The Lord has done His work by inspiring and preserving His words for you in black and white; now it is time for you to work at getting those words from the paper into your mind. Paul speaks of weapons, warfare, and taking captives (2 Cor. 10:4-5). That sounds like work to me. But it is a very rewarding work because you have a promise that instead of fear and depression, you can be full of joy and peace (Isa. 55:12).
In conclusion, your time alone can be full of fear, depression, and cursing, or it can become a time of anticipation and rewards. If you must run to the phone instead of the Bible at the thought of being alone, you have deprived yourself and your God of a great blessing. Richard Wurmbrand once said, “you are never less alone than when you are alone.” If you will spend your time alone with the Lord, watch how He will become more a part of everything you do and everywhere you go. Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you.