Every year the American Psychiatric Association conducts a poll on loneliness. In this year’s survey, 42 percent of U.S. adults reported being lonely at least once a week. That’s up from 33 percent the year before. The findings underscore why loneliness is increasingly recognized as a critical public health issue that profoundly affects psychological well-being and social functioning.
In his new book, “Reflecting the Son: How to Mirror Jesus,” author and professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams tells us that’s not what God intended for us.
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In the song “Without Love,” the great baritone crooner, Johnny Cash, declares that without love he is just a machine, barely human. “I will die without love,” he concludes. In the fall of 1967, the country star crawled deep into Nickajack Cave in the Tennessee country and lay down in the blackness to die alone. As the Man in Black later recounted,
At that moment I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from [H]im, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I’d felt over the years, seemed finally complete.
That complete loneliness was something like what rock legend John Lennon experienced during his self-described “Lost Weekend,” his two-year hiatus from his wife, Yoko. It was during that time that Lennon wrote “Scared.” The first verse opens with, “I’m scared,” repeated eight times for emphasis. In the final verse, Lennon laments how he is “tired of being alone.” This is the same Lennon who gave us one of the most anthemic lines in rock history with “All You Need Is Love.”
Counterculture icon Chris McCandless questioned whether all we need is love. “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships,” McCandless wrote a friend. He wanted to experience the pure rush of life in the Alaskan wild. After more than two months without human contact, he opened his journal and scribbled in all caps, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
What Cash, Lennon and McCandless realized was what the Bible has been saying for thousands of years. The Bible opens with a series of benedictions, or good words, that God speaks over His creation. The heavens, the earth, water, clouds, oceans, land, trees, flowers, fruit, fish, birds, wildlife. It is good! God sees a solitary Adam and speaks the first malediction (or bad word) in the Bible—”It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Whether a man is all by himself in a garden, or in a Tennessee cave, or in a Los Angeles bar or in the Alaskan wild—“It is not good for man to be alone.” We are created for community by a God of community.
The science has been slowly catching up to Scripture on this point. Harvard researcher Robert Putnam found that, “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying the next year in half.” One famous study even found that relationally well-connected people with bad health habits—smoking, poor diet and heavy drinking—consistently outlive isolated people with healthy habits. Relationally disconnected people were three times more likely to die than connected people!
Why are we such social creatures? Nancy Pearcey offers a profound clue: “For God to be fully and eternally personal, there must be genuine plurality within the godhead itself. Because of the Trinity, Christianity is the only worldview that accounts for human personhood.” Theologians have long talked about creatio ex nihilo—a Latin phrase signifying God’s creation of the universe “out of nothing.” We should affirm, right along with creatio ex nihilo, the truth of creatio ex amor — “creation from love.” Our universe was not spoken into existence by a lonely or bored deity seeking company or entertainment. God was already enjoying intimate relationship when he said, “Let there be.”
Philosopher Francis Schaeffer explained:
Modern man quite properly considers the conception of love to be overwhelmingly important. . . .Nevertheless, he faces a very real problem as to the meaning of love. Though modern man tries to hang everything on the word “love,” love can easily degenerate into something very much less because . . . he has no adequate universal for love.
In our day, we have slogans like “Love is love” and “Love wins.” But without any reference point beyond ourselves, “love” becomes little more than an endorphin rush, a sentimental buzzword or a marketing slogan. But “love,” Schaeffer declared,
existed between the persons of the Trinity before the foundation of the world. The existence of love as we know it . . . does not have an origin in chance, but from that which has always been.
In our lonesome age that longs for love but has no adequate universal for love, let us be radical Trinitarians and follow the apostle John’s advice when he said, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love comes from God.”
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That was author and professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams. For more on how the Triune God saves us from loneliness and anchors true love, see his new book “Reflecting the Son: How to Mirror Jesus.“
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/fizkes
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
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