According to a recent survey conducted by Cigna Insurance before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, there has been a 13% rise in loneliness in the United States. More than 60% of Americans reported feeling lonely, left out, poorly understood, and lacking companionship in the January 2020 survey. The survey found that men and younger people with full-time jobs were most likely to feel lonely. According to a Harvard study from last October, there was a similar rise in loneliness during the pandemic, with 61% of those aged 18-25 stating that they feel high levels of loneliness. Sometimes, the Christian can feel bad when having any sort of negative feeling, as if because we are Christ-followers we should never have negative feelings. If you read Scripture long enough, you’ll find this simply isn’t true. Negative feelings are part of life in this fallen world; even Jesus had negative feelings.

“He was despised and rejected—a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.” (Isaiah 53:3)

This is how the prophet Isaiah described Jesus 700 years before He was born. In the gospels we can certainly see those moments when Jesus was grieved, despised, rejected, even lonely. It was in His hour of greatest need, when one of His disciples betrayed Him over to the hands of a crowd of men with swords and clubs, that His closest friends abandoned Him. 

“Then all his disciples deserted him and ran away.” (Mark 14:50)

Jesus knew what it meant to be lonely. For the Christian, being lonely isn’t a foreign idea. We are, in fact, strangers in a strange world, citizens of Heaven living in a temporary place. We can take solace in the fact that while we are here as foreigners now, we always have our ever-present God with us; because of this, the loneliness a Christian may experience is quite different than the loneliness experienced by everyone else.

“Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10)

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close.” (Psalm 27:10)

A.W. Tozer, American pastor and writer, wrote about a particular loneliness the Christian might feel in his piece, The Saint Must Walk Alone:

Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all forsook him, and fled."

The pain of loneliness arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each other. The desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things to be otherwise. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his own soul and who but God can walk there with him? (…)

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. (…) It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd that Christ is All in All. 

Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to God alone. The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the broken-hearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world he is all the more able to help it. 

The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints. 

Stay in community with believers as often as you can, and take comfort in your loneliness if it is indeed a loneliness as described by Tozer. Carry your cross daily, knowing that your Savior did the same. Fight against that feeling of being at home in this world; according to Jesus in John 15:19, this world should not recognize or accept you. Let your loneliness throw you back upon God, seek in Him what you cannot find anywhere else, and remember that Christ is our all in all.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

—Redeemed