Loneliness and Solitude: Its Positive and Negative Effects
Quietness and solitude are essential in developing our inner resources. There is no limit to developing those resources if we tap into God! Isaiah 30:15 says, "In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength."
Are you tapping into God’s resources?
- One has to learn to be quiet, reflective and meditative. As a physician once said: "The failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause of mental breakdowns."
- Solitude helps to restore ourselves physically, emotionally and spiritually and is essential for good mental health. However, solitude for isolation is not.
- Social isolation really has negative effects on health.
- Goethe commented, "Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life."
- In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.
- We can choose to have times of solitude in our life, but loneliness is something we feel emotionally, but can change.
Loneliness is something we all experience, but for different reasons. The
cause of loneliness usually revolves around our extreme concern for ourselves.
Psalm 142:7 notes the following: "Bring me out of my prison, that
I may give thanks to your name!"
- Jesus chose to be alone with God and He went to lonely places to pray and to commune with His heavenly Father.
- Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named "not good." (Genesis 2).
- Emotional wounding often results in loneliness as well as repressing emotions and feelings. It is important to be in touch with our feelings. It's the way we sense that we are alive.
- We can be lonely with people and lonely when isolated. Loneliness is very real during times of family separations. That gaping inner emptiness can actually help us if we listen to its message.
- Billy Graham commented, "Loneliness is the greatest problem facing humanity today." Mother Teresa of Calcutta saw it as a heart-hunger and claimed that it is easier to relieve material poverty than this poverty of the soul: "Heart hunger can be filled with God’s love and the love of family and friends."
- Elizabeth Elliot: "The pain of loneliness is one way in which God gets our attention."
- Henry David Thoreau observed, "I never found a companion that was as companionable as solitude."
- Blaise Pascal also commented, "All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live the Christian life."
We can be lonely even with human companionship, but we are never lonely with God! As someone once said: "Loneliness is a game of pretense, for the essential loneliness is an escape from an inescapable God."
Who do you depend on to fill that void of loneliness and aloneness?