Lonely
By Cassandra
As a child, did you ever get lost from your mother in the grocery store and a sudden feeling of aloneness ran through your body sending shivers up your spine? This feeling is the feeling of loneliness, which Merriam Webster’s dictionary describes as, “being without company, cut off from others, not frequented by human beings, sad from being alone, producing a feeling of bleakness or desolation.” All of these descriptions try to explain the term of loneliness, but until you have the feeling for yourself, nothing compares.
There are many different kinds of loneliness, such as physically being lonely. Imagine this: your entire family decides to go on a weekend vacation. When you come home from school Friday afternoon, no one is home. The lights are all off. The normal rowdiness of your afternoons with younger siblings is replaced with stifling silence. You call your mom; she doesn’t answer. You call your dad, but his phone is off. You sit on the large, cold, leather sofa and look around. You are alone. The feeling of being alone is one of the worst feelings ever, like being ripped away from your mother’s loving arms into a place where only you exist in your thoughts.
The second type of loneliness is being emotionally lonely. All your friends are around you; everything is the same as normal, but you’re lonely. You look around at all the new couples popping up wherever you go, all the best friends enjoying each other’s company, all the people with places to go and things to do. As you sit there you realize you have no one to call, no one to hang out with, no one there for you. Even though you know you have plenty of family and friends, it feels as if everyone is living life outside of you and everything is passing by in a blur leaving you by yourself. It is like being in your own head, knowing people are on the outside but you are engulfed by darkness - no way out.
Life as a teenager can be rough, and many times you may feel lonely. But we as Christians know we will never actually be alone, because God is always with us. No matter how alone or abandoned we may feel, we have reassurance in God’s word that he is, and always will be, there for us, loving and protecting us. Can you imagine what Christ must have felt like on the cross when God the Father left him? No matter how lonely we get, nothing would compare to the feeling of being abandoned by God himself. I imagine that feeling would be the truest and harshest reality of the word lonely.
The term lonely or loneliness may be easy to describe, but the true meaning of loneliness cannot be explained through words, only felt by those unfortunate enough to have to feel all by themselves in such a big world. But we as Christians have great comfort in the fact that our loving God, who sent his one and only son to be sacrificed for us, will always be with us, no matter how alone we may feel.