Thinking Biblically About Loneliness: A 5-Day Reading PlanSample

Day 1: What Is Loneliness?

Loneliness has many aspects, facets, and causes. It often occurs when we feel a lack of emotional, social, mental, and spiritual connections with God, others, and ourselves, accompanied by suffering, sadness, depression, and anxiety.

There are five main types of loneliness: emotional, social, cultural, existential, and spiritual. A person can experience several types of loneliness at the same time. Loneliness is usually a subjective internal state that does not always coincide with the objective reality of a person’s social situation. “It is not good to be alone and lonely, ” goes the well-known saying. But it is often worse to be among other people and still be lonely. In reality, the quality of social relationships is more important than their quantity.

Loneliness and solitude are also not the same thing. Times of solitude are often something we chose, whereas we may feel less agency in times of loneliness. It promotes recreation, self-discovery, thinking, creativity, and innovation.

There are also positive aspects of loneliness. Times of loneliness can be useful as they give us space to reassess our values, to realize how much we need other people, and at the same time, they create an excellent opportunity for understanding our uniqueness and identity.

Where do feelings of loneliness come from? Intimate or emotional loneliness is generally born from an unfulfilled need for affection, acceptance, and belonging.

When we don’t understand our identity, our place in the world, or who God is, and we have a distorted image of God in our minds, it leads to the disruption of communication with God and gives rise to a feeling of existential and spiritual loneliness. These types of loneliness, in turn, can cause the social loneliness associated with problems in our relationships with others.