Feeling Unloved and Lonely

Unloved and Feeling Lonely
Over the last year, I’ve had quite a few emails from women of all ages (and some men too) who query me about how to deal with feelings of loneliness and abandonment by God because they’ve not been able to find someone with whom to share their lives. So that is what I want to address here, keeping in mind that everyone’s story is different. You may be divorced, widowed, or never have married at all. But instead of dwelling on why this happened to you (most of you already know deep in your heart) I want to address how better to deal with the reality you find yourself living.

That said; let me say unequivocably, loneliness, for whatever reason, is tough. So don’t think that I don’t understand. Just because I’ve been married for forty years doesn’t mean that I’ve not experienced intense loneliness from time to time; especially when my marriage was in trouble or at times when I felt like an utter failure because of abusive bosses, periods of clinical depression, or after losing a loved one (like my brother’s suicide in 1990).

I will be honest and say that in each of those times I was not close to God. I may have prayed and done things for God, but I didn’t have a relationship with him, because I was angry, depressed, and hurt. I felt he’d allowed terrible things to happen in my life and I was feeling more like an abused orphan instead of a beloved child of God.

But at some point along the way, it hit me that I was creating God in the image of man, instead of the other way around, and attributing to him human character flaws. We confuse God with our earthly parents, and forget that He is spirit, and that spirit is infinite and eternal.

The Bible says that God is unchanging, and that there is “no evil found in him.” He is incapable of being unjust and unloving, and cannot violate his own nature. If you only understand that one Truth in your entire life, that has to be the foundational one. Without that knowledge and basic understanding, then you will be subject to every ill wind that life sends to try to knock you down, including loneliness. Every time something bad happens you’ll think God has forgotten you.

But you must also understand that God’s greatest concern for us is not our temporal happiness here on earth–it is our spiritual growth and relationship with him for eternity. That is the second most important attribute of our relationship with him that we must accept. God uses unhappiness and loneliness to bring us closer to him so we can become the person he wants us to be. That may seem cruel, but in the larger perspective, it is the highest form of love. Ask any parent who has had to withhold something from a child out of love.

That may seem to conflict with that scripture about God wanting to give us our “heart’s desires.” We just don’t understand that our desires are supposed to line up with his desires. I find it terribly easy to forget to ask God what he desires, especially if I don’t want to hear his answer. My experience is that when I do, he either fulfills them, or I find out I didn’t desire some things quite as much as I thought I did.

If you’ve not found someone to love then it probably boils down to one of the following reasons:

1. There is some emotional block in your life you have not addressed and this block would prevent you from having a healthy relationship even if you found someone.

2. There may be something you are supposed to do with your life that hasn’t been birthed yet, and you are resisting that leading.

3. You don’t really want a relationship as much as you think, or you are afraid. If that is the case, then these issues might sabotage the health of a potential long-term commitment.

4. You are idealizing love and romance, and when you think of them rarely consider if you have the strength and courage to deal with the loss that often attends marriage and having children. That is the “happily-ever-after” thinking that I see in many women these days–largely a myth perpetuated by romance novels, books, and movies.

5. You are waiting for a man to give you a life instead of trying to find a life of your own. Get on with your life and I have a feeling a man is going to show up just when you least expect it.

Trapped in the Magic Mirror is available in PDF from my website…I strongly suggest you buy it as it will help you…and the price is being reduced to $9.99 for my bloggers. Just send me an email and I’ll make arrangements for the price reduction and email you the ebook. One of the “five fatal flaws” identified in that book is equating the love of another human with the love of God, and struggling with feeling unloveable in general because of unrequited love in our human relationships