Our Loneliness Epidemic | Real Springcreek Church | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

Amen.

Please have a seat.

Really glad you're here today.

You know, just a special announcement asking for prayer about this.

Some of you know earlier this month I celebrated an eight-year anniversary after having open heart surgery.

But what was going on eight years ago is I had, I mean, I walk, I've been walking every day, three miles a day, do it without fail, unless the weather's just totally horrible.

I'm out there and walking.

And I've been doing that for 15 years.

And I started having heaviness in my chest, went to see a cardiologist, and he told me, hey, I think you maybe have a minor blockage in one of your arteries because you couldn't be doing all this walking and have real problems.

So what we'll do is we'll do a heart cath.

We'll go in through your wrist, take a look at your heart, and put in a stent to deal with this problem.

Well, when they went into my wrist, they discovered I had four major blockages that required open heart surgery.

Well, four weeks after that, I was supposed to be in Honduras.

And they'd planned a pastor's conference for me to speak to a couple thousand pastors.

They'd printed up that many books as well, my Spanish versions of We Were Wrong.

And uh I had open heart surgery and I asked my surgeon, I said, I said, Can I go to Honduras at the end of this month?

He said, You're not going anywhere after you just had open heart surgery.

And so I had to call and I had to cancel.

Well, next week, Sunday, right after service, I'll be here for the service, and then I have to head to the airport because I'm gonna be in Guatemala for a week.

But I the the gentleman that I had committed to eight years ago to do the pastor's conference, his name is Jorge Galeano, and he's a national director for World Vision over several countries in Central America.

And I told him, I said, I'm gonna be in Guatemala, but to kind of make it up to you, I'll stay for another week to do some teaching for you if you'd like.

Well, he took that really to heart and decided I'm gonna teach in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the next week.

So I'd appreciate your prayers over that.

One day I know they're gonna take me to the television studio in El Salvador because they want me to do a talk and do a really uh good version of it so that they can put translation notes with it and then use it beyond me being there, which is even a better way to extend that influence, to have it permanently where they can share it with other people.

So I'd appreciate your prayers for me as I'm making my last minute preparations for that trip.

Uh, and then prayer for today's service because we're gonna be talking about the loneliness epidemic.

And this is something we've all faced at some point in our life, and maybe some of us are going through it right now.

I'm praying that God will just show up in a powerful way in your life and that he'll use his truth to really speak to this real need in many hearts.

So let's begin with prayer.

Father, thank you so much for this time we have together.

I thank you, God, for the opportunity that will be mine to travel to Central America to do this teaching and training for pastors and Christian leaders.

I pray, God, that you'll accompany me every step of the journey, that you'll keep me safe and you'll keep me healthy during the whole time so that I can be of service to our brothers and sisters in that region.

I pray now that as we gather around your word, that you're just going to move powerfully among us, that you'll help us to get real clarity when we find ourselves going through an experience of loneliness about what the real issues are and especially God, how your truth speaks to all those things.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

So the World Health Organization uh declared loneliness a major health concern back in 2019, and that led to the U.S.

Surgeon General to declare loneliness an epidemic, the U.S.

Surgeon General, in 2023.

So in the report where the U.S.

Surgeon General made that declaration, he specifically said this isolation can be as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and is more damaging than obesity.

So a lot of countries over the last several years have been raising the alarm around the loneliness epidemic.

But what we're learning is the way we think about loneliness shapes our experience of loneliness.

So get this.

There was a deep dive into about 144 different news articles, all from leading U.S.

newspapers and publications.

These were published between 2020 and 2022, and they uncovered a striking trend among all these articles.

Listen to what they said.

Solitude is overwhelmingly depicted as a negative, even dangerous.

These stories are ten times more likely to describe being alone as more harmful than beneficial.

So, what this is saying is this is a major concern that's being brought up by a lot of uh people who are in the uh the health field saying, listen, there is a difference between being alone and being lonely.

And oftentimes articles are not making that distinction and they're equating the two.

To give you just a simple proof of this, when you go home this afternoon, put the word lonely in a Google search engine.

Search the word lonely.

Then look at the images that come up under that search.

Almost everyone, without exception, will be a person solitary, one person all alone.

Very rarely will you see one person in a crowd.

One person in a crowd is a better description of loneliness than an isolated, alone individual.

Because being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.

What we know is being alone is not inherently harmful.

Some people are happy spending time alone.

Others interact with people every single day of their life and still feel desperately lonely.

Consider the simple fact that the average American today spends somewhere between 30% and 65% of their life.

So that's nearly a third to two-thirds of their life, their waking hours alone.

We also know that spending time alone can promote a sense of well-being, it can help you better regulate your own emotions, and can give you even greater clarity of thought.

Paul Tillich, he's a really wise man, he once observed this.

Our language has wisely sensed the difference, the two different sides of being alone.

It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and it's created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

But here's the deal.

If we don't make this distinction up front between being alone and being lonely, we'll end up addressing the wrong problem.

Other people aren't always the antidote to loneliness.

In fact, sometimes they may even be part of the problem.

I mean, let's face it, you can easily feel lonely in a crowd, can't you?

Or in a marriage, or even among your friends.

Sometimes, because we're surrounded by people, that loneliness feeling is all the more strong.

Sam Carr, he's a psychologist with the University of Bath, and he believes that the biggest myth out there is that people are always a solution to loneliness.

Listen to what he said.

People can actually be the cause of it.

Robin Williams, the late comedian, many of us know, we loved him in all of his movies, his stand-up acts, and all that.

He once said this.

I used to think being alone was the worst thing.

It's not.

It's being with people who make you feel alone.

You see, it's not physical distance that makes us feel lonely, it's emotional distance.

The loneliest people on the planet are those who are in relationships that should be fulfilling but actually aren't.

So loneliness is about not feeling connected, not about being alone.

Does that make sense?

Because that's the way we're going to talk about it today.

We're not going to talk about the experience of being alone.

We're going to talk about the feeling of loneliness.

So let's begin with the many faces of loneliness.

In the Psalms, David wrote this: Look right, look, left.

There's not a soul who cares about what happens.

I'm up against it, with no exit, bereft, left alone.

I cry out, God, call out, you're my last chance, my only hope for life.

So the cry of the lonely, what I want to show you up front, is comes in all shapes and sizes, like this first category, the young and the old.

A lot of teenagers fear loneliness like the plague.

In fact, it's why is that so many of them are willing to go along with the crowd and sometimes do foolish and even destructive things?

Because they can't stand feeling alone, being left out, somehow being looked on as different.

They even developed an acronym for this, FOMO, right?

The fear of missing out.

I don't want to miss out because if I miss out, then maybe I'm odd, the odd duck.

Maybe I'm lonely, maybe I'm this person over here.

But it's not just that.

Loneliness is not confined to the very young.

A recent major study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that nearly a third of all the adults between the age of 30 and 44 either feel frequently lonely or lonely all the time.

In fact, that group, age 30 to 44, is considered the loneliest group in America.

Did you know that?

And not just that, the elderly also face loneliness.

Many of the elderly who are living in extended care facilities will go sometimes months on end and never get a visit from a familiar face.

We know that's true.

In fact, it's not unusual for people to be so socially isolated weeks, months at a time, maybe even years, they won't see someone from their family or someone they've known in their past.

I mean, think about it.

Some of them have outlived their social networks.

Maybe the people they've known have gone on and died.

Other of their friends maybe went on to live with family members to be cared for in their old age.

Or others are in convalescent care just like they are.

So they are often go long times without a visitor, without somebody to come and be with them.

So people of all ages, which is what I'm saying, deal with loneliness, but not just that, single and married.

Now, this is something the church gets wrong all the time.

If you were to look up singles messages or single sermons on the internet, what you discover is the leading one in almost every single series in churches across this country begins with loneliness.

Because they equate being alone with being lonely.

And those things don't necessarily go hand in hand because the single life is addressed as a lonely life in church, then the solution is always proposed as marriage.

But look at the early church.

Look at Jesus and his disciples.

Many of them, well, and the majority of them were single, which recalls one church historian to say the early church looked like a singles convention.

There were a lot of single people who were in the early church.

Besides, marriage doesn't really change you, does it?

It unmasks you.

In many ways, an unhappy single person is going to be an unhappy married person.

An angry single person is going to be an angry married person.

And a lonely single person will be a lonely married person.

The only thing marriage is going to ensure is you're going to have somebody to be lonely with.

Once again, that's because loneliness is not solved by proximity, but presence.

So a lot of folks who marry out of loneliness will end up divorcing for the same reason some years later.

Job wrote about this kind of loneliness.

Listen to this.

My acquaintances are completely estranged from me.

My kinsmen have gone away.

My friends have forgotten me.

My guests count me as stranger.

All my intimate friends detest me.

Those I love have turned against me.

I've said many times, loneliness is not a single's issue.

It's not, it's a human issue.

I've known many singles who are absolutely convinced that they'd be less lonely and more happy if they were married.

But I've known just as many married people who would say, I would be happier and less lonely if I were single.

I know for me personally, the loneliest I've ever felt in my entire life was at the height of the problems that Brenda and I were having in our marriage, and I'm sleeping next to someone inches away, and we were miles apart emotionally and relationally.

For some of us, we stare across the dinner table as someone you wonder if you even know anymore.

You sleep in the same bed, but you rarely touch.

You go about your lives and you look through one another as if the other person wasn't even there.

Friends, I'm telling you, the loneliest person in America is not sleeping alone tonight.

You can share a bed and not share a life.

You can eat together, watch the same TV shows, share the same checking account, parent the same kids, but still feel abandoned and completely alone.

So being alone is not what causes loneliness.

A lack of intimacy is what causes loneliness.

Pepper Schwartz, she's a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

She said this: you can have a body right next to you, but if you feel that your deepest fears, thoughts, and needs are unseen, unheard, or unwanted by your partner, you feel lonely.

So loneliness is that feeling of being unwanted, unneeded, unloved, maybe even unnecessary.

It's this desperate feeling of wanting to be in touch and be connected with those that we should be most connected to.

But loneliness also affects women and men.

Even though both sexes struggle with loneliness, women tend to carry more shame about it.

Came across an article in Today's Christian Woman.

It was written by Nancy Smith.

She's a Christian therapist.

She said loneliness is a hard thing for most people to talk about.

There's a sense of shame connected to it.

The most common misconception I find in my practice is that women believe it's their fault and somehow it'll last forever.

In other words, because it seems that women tend to be more wired up for relationships, as a result, when a woman faces loneliness, she often feels a level of gender shame that this is somehow indicative that she's defective.

But like I say, loneliness is not limited to women at all.

Men are notorious for this.

Men, we have fishing buddies, and we have golf pals, and we have friends at work that we go to lunch with or we hang out with after work, whatever we're doing.

But men notoriously give little bits and pieces to a lot of different guys.

But they never give everything.

They never are vulnerable.

They're never truly authentic in sharing with one other individual.

And to be scattered in a lot of pieces and a lot of different people does not create this feeling of being satisfied in relationship and tend to, instead, it tends to exasperate this feeling of loneliness.

Jim Conway, he's a Christian author, several books dealing with men issues.

And he said this the American male is lonely and friendless, but he tries to maintain his macho image at all costs, even if it means isolation from other people.

So there's one more category, group of people that are going to experience loneliness, and that's believers and non-believers.

Being a follower of Jesus is not going to exempt you from loneliness.

It's not.

Everybody.

Doesn't matter if you're a follower of Christ or you consider yourself a non-believer.

Listen to what David said.

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I'm lonely and afflicted.

The troubles of my heart have multiplied.

Free me from my anguish.

So whether you have a God orientation or not is going to an escape clause for loneliness.

Bottom line, there's no question about it, most all of us in this room have either faced it in our past, are facing it now, or will face it in the future.

Because there's always going to be problems with connection.

It may not be in your marriage, it may be with your friends.

It may not be with your boss, it may be with your kids.

It could be any number of relationships, but somewhere along the line, there's going to be a disconnect, and you're going to feel not loved, not wanted, not needed in that relationship.

So let's talk about the predictable path of loneliness.

In other words, I want you to help you see when loneliness begins to kind of settle in and we begin to feel this feeling, what gives rise to it?

And the very first thing in the spiral of loneliness we're going to call pain.

Pain, like some sort of loss.

It could be a health issue, it could be divorce, it could be death, it could be your kids leaving for college, it could be a new job, it could be a loss of trust in someone you care about.

Losses in life tend to trigger loneliness.

But sometimes those losses have deeper roots.

Our pain can be rooted in deep wounding from the past.

Maybe it was an abusive parent, a partner who hurt us badly, a friend who betrayed us.

We've all experienced various levels of rejection and no one likes to be hurt.

But as a result, we learn to be cautious in relationship.

We become more careful every time we get zinged.

If it happens enough, we begin to build a protective shell around our life where only a limited number of people, if any, are going to get through.

There's a French writer, his name is Alain de Bouton, and he said loneliness is the price of being safe from emotional hurt.

It's the tax for living behind walls.

So pain is the first step in the downward spiral, but then it's followed by the second thing, which is passivity.

Now, too often lonely people become passive once they begin to experience the feeling, and they hope and they wish that someone would rescue them out of their loneliness.

It's important for you to hear me saying this.

Loneliness is a passive state that's maintained by remaining passive and doing nothing about it.

In other words, we hope that it will go away, but we're doing nothing to change that reality.

Alan Lloyd McGuinness, popular Christian writer, he said, in talking with lonely people, I've often discovered that though they lament their lack of close companions, they actually place little emphasis on the cultivation of friends.

So we know we're lonely.

We know we lack relationships that are close and meaningful, but we're doing nothing to cultivate those meaningful relationships.

And cultivates the right word because it takes time, it takes effort, it takes energy to build relationships.

Amen?

You're not going to happen into a good relationship.

You don't just find this magical person with whom everything clicks.

What it takes is commitment to conversation, time together.

It takes commitment to working through the bumps of relationship, the hiccups that come, because every relationship has those two.

So we have to work through all that.

Time and testing, relationships become meaningful.

What I'm saying is you're never going to get out of the mire of loneliness unless and until you take personal responsibility for your situation, which means you may not have chosen your loneliness, but you can choose how you respond to it.

And that's the good news.

If you're feeling lonely, you can do something about it.

But if you don't, you'll invariably move to stage three, which is pity parties.

So loneliness is always made worse by the things we tell ourselves when we're lonely.

Things like, there must be something wrong with me, that's why I'm so lonely.

Or I'm the only one who ever feels this way.

In other words, we begin to see loneliness as a defect in us.

Once you believe the lie that loneliness is a defect, you stop taking social risk.

You won't invite people over.

You don't initiate conversations.

You don't introduce yourself at a party.

You don't participate in group activities.

Now I did this my sophomore year in college.

My parents, who had been married for 20 years, had just divorced.

I hadn't seen my dad in two years.

My dad ended up leaving and didn't contact me for two years.

He left my mom for another woman.

Devastated me.

Never saw that coming at all.

The year before, the girl I dated for years thought I would marry.

She dumped me on Valentine's Day of all days.

Valentine's days after year.

I'm in Nashville.

She's in Ohio.

She calls me, dumps me on the phone.

And I wasn't getting along with all my friends that I typically hung out with at college.

So I was deep in my pain, deep in my passivity, doing nothing about it.

So I was hurting and acting as if somebody might rescue me from that pain.

So all I'm doing is really moping around and feeling sorry for myself.

I got caught in that downward spiral.

And I knew I was spiraling out of control.

Well, one of my professors was a guy named Leroy Fourlines.

And he was just known to be very insightful individual.

Some of my friends had gone to talk to him about problems.

I thought, I'll go see uh uh we Mr.

Four Lines.

And so I went to see Mr.

Four Lines.

I go to his office in the academic building.

I'm telling him all my problems.

I'm spilling my guts.

And I was confident the next words that were going to come out of his mouth were gonna be, you know, you have every right to feel sorry for yourself.

This would have decimated the average man, but you are this bulkwork of strength and character.

That's what I thought I was gonna hear.

But you know what he said to me?

I mean, I've spilled my guts, told him my whole life story.

I'm in this miserable spiral.

First thing he says, I'm out of his mouth, have you looked up to see the leaves in the trees lately?

And the moment he said that, I'm so frustrated by the question, I just said, Yeah.

I mean, I just what a moron.

I mean, why are you asking me about leaves in the tree?

I've just told you I'm hurting, I'm alone, everybody have cared about his abandonment, and you're telling me about leaves in the tree.

So he goes on to say this Keith, you've developed an incoming orientation toward life.

You're filtering everything through how it affects you.

You need an outgoing orientation where you start noticing other things in people outside yourself.

Well, that bothered me, and then he goes on to say this.

There are two types of self-centeredness people who think of themselves first and put themselves first.

That's what we typically associate with self-centeredness.

But there's also the person who's always thinking of themselves in a negative way.

But both ends of the spectrum are a form of self-centeredness because positively or negatively, you're still just thinking of yourself.

He had me, he nailed me.

That was exactly right.

I was self-centered.

Even though my every thought about myself was negative and putting myself down and jumping on myself with both boots.

I needed to focus outward and upward and not inward.

So here's what happened I walk out of the academic building.

I'm kind of still stewing and thinking about what he said, thinking I need to be more outward.

And I lift my head and I look at the tree.

There's not a leaf on the tree because it's the middle of winter.

And I had just told him confidently I'd seen the leaves in the tree.

And you know, it's just I did exactly what you just did.

I laughed.

I thought, he got me, he got me so good.

But it proved the point.

I was focusing inward, I was focusing downward, I was not focusing outward at all.

That's the shift that had to happen.

You know, in India, when they want to catch a monkey, they use a trait of the monkey against itself.

Because the monkey tends to grab onto something and won't let it go.

So to build a monkey trap, this is what they do: they'll take either a hollowed-out piece of fruit or they'll build a woven basket and they put a banana inside.

And the monkey comes and they're curious and they put their hand inside and they can tell it's a banana and they grab onto it.

Well, then somebody comes running out of the bush to grab them and they try to run away, but they won't unclench the banana.

So it's too big for their fist and that banana to come out, so they're stuck until the hunter comes and grabs the monkey.

Well, some of us we have a monkey mind.

What we do is we grab onto a thought and we won't let it go even when it's defeating us, even when it leads us into captivity.

That's what I mean.

We won't let it go.

And so I was stuck in that inward, downward orientation.

Everything I was doing was just making me captive.

I had a monkey mind.

I'm grabbing onto something and I won't let it go.

So if we don't break the cycle of pain, passivity, and pity parties, we end up at stage four, which is more pain.

You see, once you permit yourself to feed this cycle, you become desperate.

You start looking for fixes and often quick quick fixes.

The problem with quick fixes is they never address the real underlying problem.

You're still thinking the problem is because you're alone.

The problem is you're not connected.

You're not intimately connected with other people.

Loneliness is not about being alone.

So some people what we do is we become needy and manipulative and we try to use other people to meet our needs.

That's never going to work.

Others of us find out ways of just kind of numbing out so I don't have to feel those feelings that I'm feeling inside.

I may use drugs, I may use alcohol to do that.

Sometimes we spend more time on social media.

So get this.

Study after study has found that the more time we send on spend on social media, sharing sites like uh Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, the more we struggle with loneliness.

This seems to be backed up by a study done in 2017 by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

Listen to what they found.

People who reported spending more than two hours a day on social media were twice as likely to feel lonely than those who spent a half an hour on those sites.

And some of us in this room, two hours?

That's nothing, right?

I mean, we'll just sit there in our spare moments and scroll and scroll and scroll.

You know why it leads to loneliness?

Because you're comparing your behind the scenes with somebody else's highlight reel.

You're looking at somebody else and all the good stuff they want to showcase about their life, and you're comparing it to your reality, and it doesn't measure up, so you feel left out.

Bottom line, some of us are doing things that actually perpetuate loneliness once we get caught in the spiral.

Now, it could be that you see yourself in one or several or all of these stages.

There's no question that somehow, sometimes the way we respond to loneliness only perpetuates the loneliness itself.

So I want to show you instead God's remedy for loneliness.

And the first step in breaking free from loneliness in the downward cycle is attitude, moving away from a victim mentality.

It's easy to view loneliness as something inflicted on us by a cruel and uncaring world.

But we actually have more say in our loneliness than we think.

Change always begins with a new attitude, an attitude that says, today I'm going to handle my loneliness differently.

I'm going to break through isolation by reaching out to others.

I'm going to move my orientation from being inward and downward to upward and outward.

So the first step is being intentional about connecting with others.

Don't go out with an agenda like I've got to find one person to meet all my needs.

If you do that, you might as well just wear a sign that says emotional black hole.

Because that's what people are going to feel.

That you come to them trying to get all of your needs met, like you've got an umbilical cord and you want to stick it into them.

That's not what we go for.

No one person's going to meet all of your needs.

You go out to connect.

So if you want to break out of loneliness, stop saying, I have no friends, and start being a friend.

So stop focusing on what you're not getting and start focusing on what you're giving.

We give ourselves away.

This is the wisdom of God's word.

Listen to what he says.

A man who has friends must himself be friendly.

If you want to have more friends, you've got to be a friendly person.

If you're not a friendly person, you're not going to have more friends.

The fact is, a lot of our loneliness has its roots in our fear of love.

We're afraid to be open.

We're afraid to be vulnerable.

We're afraid to show what we really feel.

We're afraid that if we take a risk in relationship, we might be rejected.

But not giving ourselves away is the guaranteed stay in loneliness.

Take the risk of reaching out.

Connecting with somebody is somebody's got to make the first move, and you decide that's going to be you.

So the Gottman Institute, I've talked about these people in the past.

They amaze me.

They've done real studies about couples and couples that have longevity, and they brought up this idea several years ago.

In fact, I shared it in the message about three or four years ago about how couples connect.

And this goes beyond marriage, by the way.

So if you're not married, don't think of this as, oh, okay, here's a marriage bit.

No.

This is about any relationship you have.

Your marriage with uh your relationship with your friends, your relationship with your kids.

Any, you know, the deepest and most satisfying relationships we have, this is about that.

So Dr.

Gottman talks about something he calls bids for connection.

He says these are the major building blocks for stable, happy relationships.

And the idea originates out of observing countless couples over many years and how they interact.

Gottman, because he's done this kind of study, can now predict with 90% accuracy what couples will stay together and which ones will eventually divorce.

Bids for connection are really important in this.

It's not just about conflict and how we resolve it, but how do we respond to everyday bids?

So bids for connection are about how we, if you will, maintain that feeling of connection across friendships, across marriage, relationship with your kids.

These principles are valid because we don't rarely talk about how much this affects us in our relationship.

So, number one, types of bids.

Bids can be big or small, they can be calm or agitated, they can be happy or sad.

There's some verbal bids like, hey, can you believe it's going to rain today?

Or wow, did you just see what our kid did?

Or look at this hilarious video I just found on TikTok, or this has not been a great day.

Bids can be nonverbal.

It can be touching, it can be a pat on the back, a squeeze on the hand, a peck on the cheek, a hug.

It can be a facial expression like smiling or blowing a kiss.

It can even be just a considerate gesture like opening the door for someone or helping someone carrying the groceries from the car.

So think of it like this: when a couple comes together, so in dating, when a couple comes together, they do this naturally and spontaneously.

You ask about each other's day, you start conversations, you reach out and touch them.

You generally do the things that tell your partner that you want to be connected with them.

But as the relationship progresses, the bids for connection become less frequent.

And sometimes due to busyness, sometimes due to complacency, we stop responding to those bids.

The most important thing to remember about it is this: the more the better when it comes to bids.

So just so you know, this is not just about the frequency with which you make bids for connection to other people, it's about how the people in your life respond to the bids you make.

So I want to show you three ways of responding to bids.

Many happy couples, when they make a bid to connect with their partner, they're rewarded with response that affirms the relationship and creates a new sense of connection.

But unhappy couples often get no response or a frustrating one.

So let's talk about the three.

Number one, turning away.

In a turning away response, when one partner makes a bid to connect, it's treated as unimportant, not worthy of our time or attention.

So the bid may not even be acknowledged, or if it's acknowledged, it's very little.

So let's say your your partner you come in and your partner says, Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?

And without looking up from your phone, you said, Whatever.

Okay, that's that's a bid that's a turning away bid.

It doesn't engage, it doesn't enter into a conversation, it just shrugs the shoulders and leaves the ball in the other person's court.

Let me tell you this: most bids for connection that are met with turning away are not intended to harm.

They're usually just a result of being preoccupied or even being in a hurry.

And every couple has done this.

It's okay that it happens from time to time.

It really is.

You don't want it to be habitual.

You don't want it to become the norm.

Because if the turning away response occurs frequently, the real message that gets communicated is that person just doesn't care.

So that's one response is to turn away.

Another response is to turn against.

And turning against, I actually respond to the bid in a disrespectful, maybe a provocative, critical, or even defensive way.

For example, let's say you make a bid, hey, what a day I've had, I'm exhausted.

And your mate tells you, I told you not to take that job, I knew this is what was going to happen, I knew you'd come home unhappy every single day.

That's a turning against response.

So it stings.

If you make an attempt to connect with somebody and you receive a turning against response, it leads to hurt, it leads to anger.

It makes you less inclined to want to connect with that partner in the future.

So being constantly rejected by the one you love, when you try to make a connection, turn soulmates into cellmates.

Remember this: if you keep shutting people out, eventually they'll stop trying to get in.

The final kind of response in a bid for connection is turning toward.

When you turn toward somebody's response, what you're doing is you're giving them attentiveness, concern, interest, even curiosity.

For example, you say, I've had an awful day at work, I hate my job, and your partner says, You look tired.

Why don't you have a seat and tell me about it?

That's inviting.

It's saying, hey, give me more.

It affirms us, it calms us down, makes us feel loved, makes us feel liked.

In Dr.

Gottman's love lab, what he notices this.

Couples who stay together turn toward their partner's bid an average of 86% of the time.

So not always, not perfectly, but the overwhelming majority of the time, each bid was met with positive, inviting response.

But the couples that have divorced, they turn toward their partner's bids an average of 33% of the time.

So they still respond, they respond to those bids, but far less frequently.

So the question we always have to ask in relationship is are we turning away, are we turning against, or are we turning toward?

Like I say, it's true for marriages, it's true for dating, it's true for friendship, your relationship with your kids, your coworkers, any relationship you have, people are making bids to connect with us.

How are we responding?

So breaking through these kinds of this loneliness involves a new attitude and a new way of doing relationships.

The second thing in God's remedy is solitude, connecting with God.

So Henry Nowen wrote that we have two great distractions in life.

One, outer distractions, two are inner distractions.

Outer distractions we all understand.

It's our job, it's emails, it's phone calls, it's text we need to respond to, it's the demands of the chores that need to be done.

It's all these things, the outer distract outer distractions.

The inner distractions are different.

It's anxiety, bad memories, doubts, deep hurts.

Here's the deal.

Whenever we remove the outer distractions, the inner ones rush to the forefront of our mind, don't they?

As soon as you get away from work, as soon as you get away from the demands, the first few days on vacation, you're making notes about, man, I gotta do this when I get back, I gotta do this, gotta do this.

The outer distractions kind of become our drug to avoid the inner distractions.

We don't want those inner distractions to come to the surface.

And now one says the greatest inner distraction most people have is loneliness.

It's loneliness.

So the way to know whether or not you're really a lonely person is how you feel when you're all alone.

Because our soul speaks loudest when there's no external distractions.

Outer distractions are the masking drugs for the inner ones, for loneliness.

So if you're here today, and let's say you could hop in a car, drive three and a half hours to Beaver's Bend, and be in a cabin for four hours all by yourself, that would tell you more about your inner life than anything I'm saying today.

What happens when the whole world gets quiet?

What happens when everything is silent?

What happens when you're all alone?

What feelings rise to the surface of your life?

Because those externals, when they're stripped away, we finally come to the place where we have peace and satisfaction connected with others, or we find ourselves wanting to distract ourselves all over again.

Now I know this is not something you expected to hear me say, but honestly, one of the best remedies for loneliness is solitude.

That may sound crazy.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it's true.

You have to remember loneliness is not about being alone.

Loneliness is about feeling alone.

You can be alone and not feel lonely at all.

So think of it like this: loneliness and solitude are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Loneliness is this empty feeling of not being connected, not feeling like we belong, that nobody understands us.

Solitude, on the other hand, is the complete opposite end.

It's about feeling deeply connected to God and to ourselves.

It's an inner voice that says, whether I'm with people or not, I know my belonging is with God.

So Henry Dowin said this, this is in his book, Reaching Out.

To live the spiritual life, we must enter the desert of our loneliness and there create a garden of solitude.

Like I say, for most people, being alone is the same thing as loneliness.

It's not true.

What you need to do is you need to find in solitude what you're really missing.

Because what many of us are lacking is a deep place of connectivity to God.

And it's only in those quiet places.

I mean, isn't it amazing that when God wanted to talk to Moses, he takes him away from the crowd and up to the top of Mount Sinai?

When God wants to speak to Elijah, he gets him on the side of the mountain.

He sees the earthquake, he sees the fire and all that stuff.

But God is in the still small voice.

It's when the outer distractions are taken away that what's really on the inside can come to the surface and God can speak.

So think of it like this: Jesus knew loneliness, didn't he?

He was abandoned by the people that were his greatest followers in his greatest time of need at the cross.

He knew the loneliness of being completely misunderstood, not just by his biological family, but his hand-picked disciples.

Jesus knew the loneliness of living among people, walking the roads, healing their sick, feeding their hungry, but even after that, still being accused of having a demon and people asking him, Who are you?

But Jesus' answer to that question was to point to his relationship with God.

He said, The one who sent me is with me.

He has not left me alone.

So whenever Jesus experienced the pain of loneliness, he turned to his father.

He sought solitude.

Throughout the Gospels, you find him going away to a desert place, to a lonely place, because for him, this is not a place to reinforce his loneliness.

This is a place for him to connect to his father and remind himself that he's never truly alone because God is with him.

So solitude is different from loneliness.

For Jesus, solitude was not so much the experience of being away from people as it was bringing himself present to God.

That's what it means to face loneliness head-on.

It's discovering in our aloneness that God is there, that he's with us, and I'm never without him.

The final tool in God's remedy for loneliness is gratitude.

And this is where we listen, learn to listen to what loneliness is telling us.

Loneliness can be a gift because it's there to remind you of something.

Think about it like this: in your body, you have physical pain.

When you have physical pain, you better pay attention to it.

Because it's your body's early warning system.

It says, you keep doing this, you keep hurting me like this, you don't pay attention to me, it doesn't get better, it gets worse.

It's the early warning system.

Well, loneliness is like that for your emotional life.

Loneliness is the early warning system to tell you that something is off.

That you and I were made for connection, upward, outward.

Those are the connections we're made for.

Jesus, even He taught us the great commands: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Love your neighbors yourself.

All of relation, all of our life is summed up in two relationships: vertical, horizontal.

How are these?

Because loneliness is to remind us, how are these relationships?

How connected are we to God and to other people?

Which means the best barometer of your life where it's going and how it's going is the quality of relationships you have with other people and with God.

When you're feeling lonely, it's God's way of saying, pay attention to me.

So loneliness makes us look upward and outward.

When loneliness comes, this is what we do.

We reach up, we reach out.

Now, what's amazing to me is how God shows off.

I didn't plan for this message to dovetail with this weekend.

We have small groups all throughout the main auditory, through the lobby back here, people wanting to connect with you.

For some of you, you come to Spring Creek.

We love that you come to Spring Creek.

You consider this your home, but you've not really made it your home until you've connected with other people here.

And this is one of the things God is providing a perfect opportunity for you to make some real connections and know people and to be known by other people.

This is a great step out of loneliness.

Now let me tell you, my job is a lonely profession.

Most people don't understand the pressures that pastors feel to keep ministries growing and vibrant.

They don't understand the weight that I feel week to week that our pastors need to be paid well and their families need to be taken care of.

They don't understand the burden of carrying so many hurts and heartaches within the congregation, coupled with my own personal challenges and problems.

Now, some of you know this about me, some of you don't.

I am prone to depression.

It's easy for me to close in on myself.

And I have done it many times over the years.

It's easy for me to close into myself.

In fact, if you know me very well, you know that when I get under a lot of stress, I get quiet.

I get really quiet.

And people who know me well will say, hey, is everything okay?

And they'll check on me because they know that's a sign.

When I begin to withdraw, they say, okay, there's something going on with Keith, and I need to check on him.

I can tell you this from the heart.

No minister has longevity in the ministry without developing a strong relationship with God and with other people.

This is my lifeline.

It's the only reason I'm still your pastor after 36 years.

One, because I live in a very settled place in my relationship with God.

I know who He is to me, I know who I am to Him.

I live in that, I relish that.

He keeps me strong, He keeps me stable.

And I have people who get me, who know me, who love me, and are always there for me.

And because this is strong, and this is strong, I'm able to have longevity.

So none of this stuff I'm telling you today is theory for me.

It's all practice.

It's what I do, it's how I live.

I know it works.

Because if you want to get on this journey out of loneliness, you do it by reaching up and reaching out.

You're worth it.

So loneliness is a human problem.

All of us are going to face it in our life if we're not facing it today.

Loneliness is not shameful evidence that you're defective.

Loneliness is evidence that you're human, that you were made to crave for connection.

So what we do when the feeling arises makes the difference as to whether we enter the downward spiral of loneliness or we rise upward and outward to address the real issues behind it all.

Some of you are just like me.

Everything seems to be going wrong in your life.

And when you do that and you're going through that, you engage in thinking behaviors that only reinforces your loneliness.

I was self-centered, not egotistical, not thinking how great I was.

I was just thinking about myself in a negative, self-recriminating way all the time.

I developed an incoming personality rather than an outgoing one.

And that shift had to occur.

It had to move from down and in to up and out.

That's our salvation.

Others of us, we've misdiagnosed the problem.

We've been thinking all this time, I'm lonely because I'm alone.

Those just make sense.

But that's not true.

Loneliness is a connection problem, not a people problem.

It's not that you need more people in your life, it's that you need to learn how to connect better with the people God's already placed in your life.

So start recognizing and responding to the bids for connection that are all around you.

For many of you in this room, this would exponentially improve every relationship you have if you just start paying attention to that.

Still, others of us need we need to boldly step out of our aloneness to engage in the discipline of solitude.

But it's because it's only in solitude that I discover God is always there and He never abandons, He's there for me.

Now I'll tell you this: when you first experience solitude, you'll experience what everybody else has.

All the inner distractions rush to the surface of your life.

That's what happens.

It's invariable.

It will happen that way.

But it won't happen that way all the time.

Eventually those things will clear, and you'll find yourself tuning into that still small voice and hearing God speak to you in ways you've never experienced before.

That's what I long for you to experience.

What I had to find in my solitude was the real solution to my loneliness.

And finally, I learned to thank God.

Every time the feeling of loneliness arises because it's telling me to pay attention to what's really going on in my relationships.

Loneliness says, pay attention.

Something needs connection.

And our response as Christ followers becomes reach up, reach out.

That's my prayer.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you today for all that you are.

And I thank you, God, for how you have been so faithful to me over the years and help me learn to address loneliness because this has been a real issue for me, especially as someone who has a bent toward melancholy, toward depression, that I can easily fold in on myself and abandon myself in the process.

But Lord, you have taught me a better way of living.

You've taught me that it's easy to become very self-centered in a negative way.

And some people in this room can relate to that because they find themselves to have a black belt and beating themselves up.

They can just be merciless when it comes to being self-critical.

But God, that is still a selfish and self-centered orientation.

Because even though they're thinking of themselves in a negative way, they're still thinking of themselves all the time.

That's not the way you made us to live.

We were made for connection.

We were made to look up and to look out.

We were made to reach up and to reach out.

And so, God, I help, I pray that you would help us to pay attention to that hunger, to that thing that loneliness is telling us that there's something amiss in our connections.

So, God, help us to address the real problems.

And God, help us, as we find ourselves in these spirals, to be able to move out of a monkey mind that grabs on to a problem and just will hang on to it even when it leads us into deeper captivity.

Help us, God, to say, I need an outgoing orientation.

I need to lift my head above my circumstances.

I need to notice the people and circumstances around me.

And God, most of all, I need to be connected intimately with you.

Because, God, you are always there.

You never abandon.

I'm never truly alone because you're with me.

You're my papa, you're my Abba, you're my best friend, you're my lover.

You're everything I've ever needed and ever wanted.

And you are available to me all the time.

So, God, I pray for everybody in this room that God, you would just move in our hearts and help us, God, to care for the people in our life.

We're going through this, that we can help point them in the right way, and that is to point them to you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

God bless you all.