Loneliness

I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. PSALM 102:7

Few Christian writers of the twentieth century had more right to speak about being alone than Elisabeth Elliot. She waited five years, much of it apart, for a man who was not sure he would ever marry. She went to Ecuador as a single woman. She was a widow at twenty-nine, with a daughter not yet a year old, in a jungle station far from her family. She lived for a time among a people whose language she was still learning and whose ways were not her own, in a household where relations were strained. She married again and was widowed again within five years. For most of her adult life, in one way or another, she knew what it was to come home to an empty room.

In 1988 she gathered what she had learned into a short book called simply Loneliness. It was later reissued under the title The Path of Loneliness, and the longer title says something about its argument. Loneliness, for her, was not a dead end. It was a road, and the question was where it led.

Not a sin, and not a disease

The first thing the book does is to take loneliness seriously. She did not treat it as a failure of faith, as though a believer who felt alone must be doing something wrong. Nor did she treat it as a problem to be solved by the right technique, a busier diary or a better social life. It is, in her account, one of the real sufferings of a fallen world, felt by the widow and the single, but also by the married, the elderly, the sick, the newcomer, the missionary, the leader who must decide alone, and the believer who has simply been misunderstood. Scripture is full of it. The psalmist compares himself to a sparrow alone on a roof. Elijah lies down under a juniper tree and asks to die. Paul at his first defence finds that every man has deserted him.

At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me. 2 TIMOTHY 4:16–17

And above all there is the Lord Himself, forsaken by His friends in the garden and crying out on the cross. The Christian who is lonely is not walking a road that Christ has not walked first. That, for her, was the beginning of comfort: not an explanation, but company.

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. JOHN 16:32

The wilderness

The governing picture of the book is the wilderness. In Scripture the wilderness is a hard place — dry, lonely and dangerous — but it is also the place where God meets His people. Israel was led there and fed there. Moses was sent there before he was sent to Pharaoh. Elijah was fed there by ravens and by an angel. John the Baptist was formed there, and the Lord Himself was driven there by the Spirit before His ministry began. The prophet Hosea even pictures God leading His unfaithful people into the wilderness on purpose, in order to speak to them tenderly.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. HOSEA 2:14

Her counsel, in substance, was that the lonely believer should not spend all his strength trying to get out of the wilderness, but should ask what God means to say to him in it. That does not mean refusing help, or friendship, or marriage if it is given. It means refusing to treat loneliness as the worst thing that can happen, and refusing to grasp at whatever will dull it. She was frank that many people try to fill the empty place with things that cannot fill it — compulsive busyness, entertainment, food, a hurried relationship, self-pity nursed in private — and that these leave the heart lonelier than before.

Accept, and offer

The practical heart of the book is the same pattern that runs through all her teaching, and which chapter six of this companion has already traced: receive what God gives, and give it back to Him. Loneliness, she taught, is to be accepted as part of the life God has assigned for now — not resented, not denied, not dressed up as something else. It is then to be offered to Him, as one would offer any other gift. The widow’s empty evenings, the single woman’s unshared table, the unanswered letter, the ache at a wedding: these can be laid in the hands of Christ as a sacrifice, and in His hands they become something other than a wound.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. PSALM 68:6

This was not, in her telling, a trick for making the feeling go away. Sometimes it does not go away. But the offering changes what the loneliness is for. Instead of being a hole in the middle of life, it becomes a place of meeting with God and a source of usefulness to others. She urged the lonely, again and again, to turn outward — to look for someone else who is alone and to do something for them. The person who has been comforted in the wilderness has something to give.

Singleness and widowhood

Two particular kinds of loneliness run through the book, and through her other writing too. The first is singleness. She held, with the apostle Paul, that the unmarried life is not a lesser life or a waiting room, but a calling in which a person may be wholly given to the Lord. She did not pretend it was easy, and she knew from her own long wait how strong the longing for marriage can be. But she insisted that a single person’s life belongs to God as fully as a married person’s, and that it is to be lived now, not postponed until a wedding that may never come.

But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. 1 CORINTHIANS 7:32

The second is widowhood. She wrote of it from inside, and twice over. She did not romanticise grief, and she did not hurry the widow towards cheerfulness. But she did insist that the God who had taken a husband had not withdrawn Himself, and that Scripture’s promises to the widow are not decorations. God calls Himself her husband and her defender. He has not stopped being either.

For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called. ISAIAH 54:5

Weighing it

There is much here that is simply wise and simply scriptural, and many lonely readers have found the book a steady friend. Two cautions may be worth carrying.

The first is that her own temperament was unusually self-contained. She was reserved by nature and disciplined by habit, and some readers find her counsel to accept and offer loneliness bracing to the point of austerity. They should remember that the same Scripture which tells us to bear our burdens also tells the church to bear one another’s. Her teaching does not let the church off the hook. The lonely are to offer their solitude to God; the rest of us are to set the solitary in families, by an open door and a laid place at the table.

The second is that loneliness sometimes has causes that need more than spiritual counsel — depression, illness, isolation that could be remedied by practical help. Nothing in her teaching forbids seeking that help, and she would not have wanted it read that way. Acceptance is not the same as passivity. It is the refusal to rebel against what God has given, joined with every lawful effort to do the next thing well.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. DEUTERONOMY 31:8

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the kind of loneliness you know best — singleness, widowhood, distance, misunderstanding, leadership, age. Tell God about it plainly, without dressing it up.

2. Ask what you have been using to fill the empty place. Is it filling it, or only dulling it?

3. Read Hosea 2:14–15. What might God want to say to you in the wilderness that He could not say elsewhere?

4. Offer your loneliness to God today in a short, specific prayer, as you would offer a gift.

5. Think of one person who is alone this week. Invite them to your table, or write to them, before the week is out.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You were left alone by Your friends, and yet You were not alone, because the Father was with You.

You know the empty places in my life, the evenings no one shares and the burdens no one sees. I do not hide them from You.

I accept the life You have given me for now, and I offer You its loneliness. Take it, and make it a place where I meet You.

Make me a friend to the lonely, and set the solitary in families through me, for Your name’s sake. Amen.