You Are Not Alone: Finding Grace in the Ache of Loneliness

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Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His Kingdom.

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0:00:24.5 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved, welcome back. If you’re new to this podcast or to the ministry of Serge, we are a global mission sending agency that’s devoted to the idea that followers of Jesus are sent with the message of God’s grace, empowered by God’s grace to live openly and honestly about our continual need for God’s grace in our own lives and in all of this, even as we serve the world and participate in God’s Kingdom. So if you want to know more information, go explore our website, serge.org, S-E-R-G-E.org. And if you want to give to the work of Serge and to this podcast or to any particular missionaries and the projects that they’re doing with our company, go to give.serge.org. And if you like this podcast, leave a rating and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’re all in this together, and it’s a joy to partner with you. And speaking of partnership, today’s episode is actually all about loneliness. There’s a lot of talk lately about the epidemic of loneliness that we’re seeing in our culture today. The last two movies that I saw in the theater both dealt with the themes of loneliness. The first is Project Hail Mary. So good. Here you got a guy who wakes up on a spaceship all alone and with amnesia. So he doesn’t even have the camaraderie of his own memory to bring him comfort. He’s extremely isolated and he needs a friend. And part of the beauty of this movie is watching someone who’s all alone find a friend. And the second was the new Spider-Man movie. Now, I grew up watching the old cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on Saturday mornings. And this new movie couldn’t be any more opposite. Spider-Man is loved, but no one knows him. No one remembers Peter Parker. He’s isolated, alienated, and not known. And you see the desperation that comes from being forgotten. Two great movies about how it’s not good for us to be alone. Well, my guest today is my friend, pastor and author Bill Smith, and he’s written a book called You Are Not Alone. And he comes at this epidemic of loneliness from a really interesting perspective that shows how the feeling of loneliness is actually a symptom of a larger issue. Maybe the experience of loneliness is an unfamiliar feeling for you, but something we all share as humans living in a broken world is the reality of our aloneness. And Bill tells a story of how he got a really discouraging email from someone that made him experience the reality not of this feeling of loneliness, but of his aloneness where he was misunderstood, alienated, and isolated. We were not meant to be forgotten. We’re meant to be fully known and fully loved. And it’s our deepest desire, along with fully knowing and fully loving. We all hope that there’s someone who sees and knows and loves us, and we long to see and know and love them. Curt Thompson says we all come into the world looking for someone looking for us. So the question is, what does Jesus think about our aloneness? What does He think about the epidemic of loneliness in our culture? Now, you may be surprised. Jesus has a lot to say. And the good news is that Jesus’ response is full of tenderness and mercy. So as we jump into this conversation I had with Bill, be encouraged. If you feel alienated, misunderstood, and all alone, you’re not alone. It’s normal to feel this way. It’s part of the human experience, and it’s not good to be alone. But the reality of the gospel of Jesus and His incarnation, His life, death, and resurrection means, beloved, you are not alone.

 

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0:04:36.3 Jim Lovelady: Bill Smith, my friend, finally, welcome to Grace at the Fray.

 

0:04:39.2 Bill Smith: It’s great to be here, Jim.

 

0:04:40.5 Jim Lovelady: I realized that we’ve known each other for a decade now.

 

0:04:45.2 Bill Smith: I was trying to do the math. I’ve lost track…

 

[overlapping conversation]

 

0:04:49.6 Jim Lovelady: It’s almost… Yeah, it’s almost a decade. So, yeah, it’s awesome for you to be in the studio. I hear you have a new book coming out.

  

0:05:00.1 Bill Smith: That must be the publisher.

 

0:05:02.8 Jim Lovelady: That’s right. Yeah. So you are a writer. Well, you’re a pastor. I don’t know how… You don’t have to do it in order, right? Because it’s always like, I’m a child of God, husband, pastor, writer, somewhere in there. But I don’t know how many books you’ve written. It’s quite a few books and articles. But when this episode goes out, your new book will be out for maybe a week or something like that.

 

0:05:29.8 Bill Smith: Yeah, it should just have come out.

 

0:05:30.7 Jim Lovelady: So, hey, congrats.

 

0:05:32.1 Bill Smith: Thanks.

 

0:05:32.6 Jim Lovelady: I’m going to leave a link in the show notes for folks to pick up your book. But yeah, talk to me about loneliness. That’s what the book is about. Much desired subject, by the way. A lot of people have been like, “Hey, it would be great if we talked about ‘where does God meet us in our loneliness?’”

 

0:05:49.7 Bill Smith: Yeah. It’s actually, obviously, across the country at this point in time, people have called it an epidemic. Obviously something that a lot of us feel, but also some of us don’t feel it to the same extent. So the publisher had asked at one point, “Would you be interested in writing on this?” And I debated just like for like three or four months. And I was on the verge of writing back and saying, yeah, that’s just not me. I don’t have a whole lot to say about that. I don’t even know where to start. And then I got an email. It’s one of those emails that you read it and I literally sat back in my chair and I thought, if I stop funding my retirement account at this moment, how much of a pay cut can I take?

 

0:06:34.7 Jim Lovelady: Oh.

 

0:06:35.3 Bill Smith: Because it’s clear that I’m not wanted. And I thought, that’s my way in. It’s not so much I have this existential feeling of I’m all by myself and nobody calls me on Friday night. It’s, I’m not wanted. I’m cut off, I’m alienated, I’m isolated, and people would rather just not have me back.

 

0:06:55.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:06:56.1 Bill Smith: And that, I think, actually is a more fruitful path into thinking about this thing that I think maybe we too glibly call loneliness.

 

0:07:06.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. When you told me that you were writing a book on loneliness, I was like… I chuckled to myself because I was like, this is one of the most introverted people I know writing on loneliness. And so I kind of got a laugh. And then I read your book and you even mention that. So tell me, how does an introvert write a book about loneliness?

 

0:07:25.2 Bill Smith: Yeah, see, from that angle, I don’t often feel lonely.

 

0:07:30.5 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:07:31.0 Bill Smith: I have a lot of friends, I have a lot of conversations, but I’m really okay just in my own head for hours. That’s not really a problem.

  

0:07:40.0 Jim Lovelady: The vast universe that is Bill Smith’s head.

 

0:07:42.4 Bill Smith: No, it’s just that I’m easily amused, maybe. Yeah. So that avenue in does not touch me. And actually, if you go with that direction, so you look up lonely or loneliness in your concordance, the Bible’s not going to say a whole lot. And you’re suddenly going to think, well the Bible doesn’t get me. It’s not really written to the problems of modern humanity. But when you take it more from God’s perspective, which is, I think, hard because most of us come at life from this, here’s how I experience life. Here’s… That’s obviously the most important. If you go back into Genesis, it’s not Adam who recognizes that he’s on his own, it’s God. And that’s when you start to realize, huh, Adam in that moment is not necessarily feeling like he really wants a friend. He’s surrounded by the animal kingdom. He’s got this relationship going with God. But God comes and says something here is not good. And it’s in his, on his ownness as an image of God that God says that can’t work.

 

0:08:48.7 Jim Lovelady: That’s not good.

 

0:08:49.4 Bill Smith: No. God’s three in one. He’s interpersonal, tri-personal. There are relationships, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, a solitary human being cannot adequately image a tri-personal being. And so when you take it from the perspective of I cannot glorify and enjoy God as fully on my own as I can in community, suddenly the thing we’re talking about looks and feels very different.

 

0:09:16.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. I appreciate how you distinguish the experience of loneliness, like the feeling of loneliness, and the state of aloneness. It is not… It’s interesting. Yeah, God doesn’t say it is not good for man to be lonely.

 

0:09:35.0 Bill Smith: Yeah.

 

0:09:35.8 Jim Lovelady: It’s not good for him to be alone. So articulate… I mean, you talk a lot about it in the book, and that’s kind of the foundation of going to the deeper issue of loneliness, but talk about the difference between loneliness and aloneness?

 

0:09:49.6 Bill Smith: Yeah. Loneliness is where I have a certain emotional reaction to my state of being alone. It’s my existential experience of being on my own. And some of us feel that and some of us don’t feel that.

 

0:10:03.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:10:04.9 Bill Smith: But that doesn’t really take away the not goodness of aloneness. Even if you don’t feel it, you’re still… When you are on your own, you cannot enter into what you were made for as God’s image bearer. I think so often we are captured with me and my glory rather than Him and His. And so when I’m feeling lonely, I just want the feeling to go away. And so what will I do? I’ll reach out and call Jim because Jim will come over and then we’ll be together and I won’t feel lonely anymore. In other words, I’ll use you, to be medicinal for my soul.

 

0:10:46.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. And we use people, we use things, we use institutions, technology.

 

0:10:50.0 Bill Smith:  Anything to make the feeling go away.

 

0:10:54.7 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:10:55.3 Bill Smith: Now, let’s go back to the Creator. He also puts people in His schedule, but not so that He doesn’t feel bad. So he’s interested in talking with you. He wants a relationship with you. He reaches out to you, invites you into His world, not to necessarily be… Not to get something from you and be filled up by you, but in order to give. And so in that moment where I swipe right or I call a friend out of a sense of I need to connect so that I don’t feel bad, I’m no longer imaging God.

 

0:11:27.5 Jim Lovelady: Interesting. Loneliness is not the main issue. There’s this aloneness and all the things that are wrapped up in it like shame and being known and experiencing knowing and being known and friendship and community and the intimacy of that. It’s not good for Jim to be alone. And so when Jim is in the state of aloneness, he starts to feel it. He starts to feel lonely. So he starts to doomscroll. He starts to feel envious about how other people online are. Well, they look like they’re happy. Or he’ll… Maybe I’ll go join the YMCA, or maybe I’ll go shopping and I’ll find myself lonely in a crowded mall, or all these different things I’m trying to do to take away that feeling of loneliness when it’s actually a symptom, I guess.

 

0:12:25.3 Bill Smith: I think that’s the right way to say it. And so if you address the symptom by using people, by doomscrolling, by trying to distract yourself, have something you sensorially, or you go off shopping and you find yourself now in a crowd but you still are all by yourself, I think all you’re doing is you’re pushing off that feeling, the symptom, attempting to address it in ways that just actually leave you more lonely because they leave you more isolated.

 

0:12:55.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. I was reading your book in my backyard and I was trying to think through, I was trying to pause and think about my loneliness and my experience of loneliness and my experience of aloneness. And I didn’t want to. As soon as I started doing that, I was like, this is not fun. This is ugh. And then the temptation to not go there, which is interesting because it was like in solitude I discovered how my loneliness is, I guess, a symptom of aloneness. And what do I want? I want to be known. I want someone to look at me and go, “Hey, you’re all right. Hey, it’s going to be okay. All the things that make you feel guilty and full of shame, I know those things.” I want someone to enter into that and be with me in all of that stuff. Be with me but not feel the sense of shame and the desire to want to hide and go be alone. It feels like there’s this, I don’t know, like a feedback loop of I feel ashamed, so I want to go be alone, and then I feel lonely and it makes me feel ashamed, so I want to… There’s this way that we go into more and more isolation and alienation. Right?

 

0:14:14.7 Bill Smith: Yeah, and I think you can trace a lot of that right back to the garden, right? Where in the moment that God’s image bearers reject Him, they also immediately cut off relationship with each other. And so fig leaves and all the rest of that. And it’s astounding in that moment, God’s not actually in that picture. It’s just each other. And they’ve already learned, “I don’t feel comfortable around you. I don’t feel comfortable being seen and known in the same way that I was. There’s something internal that I feel this sense of shame, and I just want to be… I want to guard and protect me.” But at the same moment, I’m not interested in guarding and protecting you because as soon as God shows up and He says, “What’s going on?” the blame game begins. And so you have both this impulse to cover…

 

0:15:03.3 Jim Lovelady: “It’s the woman you gave me, Lord.”

 

0:15:05.6 Bill Smith: Yeah. And she dimes out the serpent, who ought to be dimed out. And yet there’s this, “It’s not me. It’s not me. Don’t look at me.”

 

0:15:16.4 Jim Lovelady: “Don’t look at me.”

 

0:15:16.7 Bill Smith: “Oh, look over there.” And so there’s this attack and cover that then just pushes us away from each other. So, and even in the moment then in your backyard, you’re like, it’d have to be a very special person to enter into this and for me to feel comfortable.

 

0:15:33.9 Jim Lovelady: Right. Right. So I was thinking about how it’s not good for man to be alone and how God gives Adam another human. And suddenly we have humanity and we have community and we have intimacy within. It’s not some animal, lizard, whatever. Adam’s naming all the animals. It’s a human.

 

0:16:00.4 Bill Smith: Yeah. Equal worth, equal value.

 

0:16:02.0 Jim Lovelady: Right. And so the thing that I can’t get… Wrap my mind around, help me with this, is, okay, God goes… God doesn’t say, I could go be with him and he wouldn’t be alone.

 

0:16:13.6 Bill Smith: Uh-huh.

 

0:16:14.7 Jim Lovelady: He says, no, no, no, I need to make… I need to make Eve. I need Adam and Eve to be in community. So explain that to me. Why didn’t God say, he’s alone. I’ll go be with him?

 

0:16:27.2 Bill Smith: I’ll satisfy all of his needs. I can do that better than anyone else can.

 

0:16:31.5 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:16:33.0 Bill Smith: I think as I read Genesis 1 and 2, when we ask that question… I’ve asked that question. When we ask that question, we are still thinking about the individual’s sense of incompleteness, and we’re not looking at it as an image bearer. God is on a completely different plane than a human being. And so for Him to satisfy us relationally, there is an element there where we have to have that, but in that relating to us, it doesn’t reflect who He is. Because He’s of the same substance but different distinct persons. And so we have to have that same kind of thing where we’re connecting with someone of the same substance who is like us, but very different from us. I think it’s really telling that Eve comes from Adam. She’s not generated out of her own dust pile.

 

0:17:31.6 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:17:32.0 Bill Smith: And so there is no, well, you’re not really kind of the same. No, they are of the same substance but unlike each other.

 

0:17:39.1 Jim Lovelady: Right. Interesting.

 

0:17:40.3 Bill Smith: And so it’s an imaging thing that takes place among us as we relate with each other in community. That’s the glorious goodness. And as we do that, we go, huh, wow, I don’t have the symptom of feeling like I’m by myself anymore.

 

0:17:57.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, this is where the book moved into real mysterious, kind of mystical, sacramental territory for me, where I was thinking about how there’s the vertical relationship and then the horizontal relationship and how intertwined actually they all are, or related, so closely related. And I’m going, okay, well, I can’t really parse this out. It’s just one big mystery. And it’s interesting that my experience of loneliness kind of starts to point me in the direction of, if I feel this sense of loneliness, it seems to be an invitation to wrestle with Jesus, not just about my loneliness and my feeling of loneliness. It’s deeper.

 

0:18:44.2 Bill Smith: Yes. It’s, I’m not participating in the body of Christ. That metaphor is really powerful in my mind. We are organically linked is where that metaphor goes. And to downplay that and say, “Well, we just don’t all have the same role.” that’s more of a business, hierarchical org chart.

 

0:19:03.6 Jim Lovelady: Right, right.

 

0:19:04.9 Bill Smith: This is… There’s a…

 

0:19:06.2 Jim Lovelady: Which brick am I in this wall?

 

0:19:07.7 Bill Smith: Yeah, exactly. You do have that. You’re a living stone in the building of the temple.

  

0:19:11.2 Jim Lovelady: Right, true, true. But I’m not… It’s not just that.

 

0:19:15.2 Bill Smith: It’s not just that. No, it’s this…

  

0:19:17.4 Jim Lovelady: Well, it’s a living stone.

 

0:19:18.3 Bill Smith: Eyes and hands are not the same thing.

 

0:19:20.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:19:20.7 Bill Smith: And there is an element, I think, there that goes beyond what our more naturalized Western world is comfortable with.

 

0:19:28.5 Jim Lovelady: Say more about that, what do you mean?

 

0:19:30.3 Bill Smith: Given the enlightenment, given the heavy emphasis on materiality and this world is all there is, if we can’t see it, measure it, put it on a scale, we tend to assume that that’s… That it’s not real. And you get this… I veer away from the words mystical, but there is a… I would say there’s a spiritual reality to our interconnectedness that I think an image like the body of Christ really pushes us toward.

 

0:19:58.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. As you were writing this book, how did it start to shape the way that you pastor and shepherd people? Did it give you kind of like you start to see lonely people more or? I don’t know, did you start to have more conversations about it? Kind of like when I buy a Hyundai, I start to see Hyundais everywhere.

 

0:20:22.2 Bill Smith: I don’t know if it was that so much as there are many more degrees of being alone, cut off, alienated, isolated than I think we give ourselves an awareness of. I run through those first chapters in the book. Here’s five different ways that this takes place. Does someone who’s suffering from some kind of long-term illness, do they understand the impact of how that shrinks their world smaller and smaller and smaller, cuts them off from the people around them so that people just get used to not seeing them and used to not thinking about them? I think we are… We experience being alone far more than maybe than some of us are aware when we’re unhelped or unsupported or ignored or forgotten or overlooked.

 

0:21:15.7 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:21:16.1 Bill Smith: Things that we’re just sort of trained to, well, just get over yourself.

 

0:21:19.9 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:21:20.4 Bill Smith: Instead, no, actually there’s something here that disrupts the glory that God should be getting from his people united.

 

0:21:27.9 Jim Lovelady: Where did you discover that in your own life?

 

0:21:30.5 Bill Smith: That email was huge, helpful for me just to realize how much Jesus was hated. We all know, okay, there’s a couple of times where the crowd was upset and wanted to throw Him off a cliff. When you go through the Gospels and recognize there were nine different times that we are told about where He was threatened with death, you think, wow, how do you do that? How do you keep going through life with that level of threat against you and not turn inward, not become smaller, not say, you know what? People are really nasty and dangerous and the less you have to do with them, the better.

 

0:22:07.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. You keep using language that’s like, when I feel lonely, I start to turn inward, which makes you feel more lonely, which makes you turn more inward. And I love that there’s this like, no, Jesus is going to reach in and He’s going to give you the courage to start moving out of yourself. And that was one of my takeaways. Like, when I’m feeling lonely, a lot of my… For me, a lot of that is like I’m just thinking about myself and my tendency to veer into self-pity is just very strong. And so, woe is me, I’m so lonely. And so then that self-pity, no one… Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Well, then you must be alone. You’re all alone. You’re acting like you’re all alone and you’re wallowing in your aloneness. And as I was reading your book, I was forced to kind of wrestle with my own tendencies to go, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, and then to recognize, well, that’s a lie. That’s not true. Jesus knows those things, knows those things intimately. And Jesus is with me in this moment as I’m contending with the idea that when my wife upsets me, nobody understands. And all I want to be… All I want is to be understood. It’s like, well, you don’t need to be understood. Who’s the… There was some saint that said, “Seek not to…” maybe, I think it was St. Francis of Assisi, maybe, I can’t remember who it was attributed. “Seek to understand more than to be understood.” And I was wrestling with that as I was reading your book, going, oh, well, for my part, I’m going to just sit here on my journey of faith and I’m just going to wait until someone can come along who understands me. And until then, I’m not going to seek to understand anybody else, so there.

  

0:24:10.6 Bill Smith: And so I think that’s a really helpful unpacking of just where I think often people can be, or myself, in not feeling lonely but feeling unwanted. I didn’t want to go there until the second half of the book. And so the first half is all about Jesus, but it’s all about Jesus entering into each of those experiences of being cut off from other people in various ways. It was one of those where I had to really work for other people to understand what I was trying to do because I didn’t want in any of those times to say, well, Jesus did it, you can.

 

0:24:46.1 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:24:47.0 Bill Smith: Or, He was a human being and He just took a bunch of shots and was the most relational person you’ve ever met. I wanted to say Jesus knows what it is to be unwanted, to be forgotten…

 

0:25:01.6 Jim Lovelady: Misunderstood.

 

0:25:01.7 Bill Smith: Misunderstood. Every aspect of your experience of being alone He’s entered into when He didn’t have to and has understood it from the inside. My thesis there is if someone goes to the trouble of crossing unbelievable amounts of time and space to get to where you are so that they understand you from the inside out, by definition you’re no longer alone.

 

0:25:27.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:25:27.8 Bill Smith: You just might not be aware of that person, but you actually are in relationship with someone who totally gets what it’s like for you to sit in the back and feel like, “Well, I’m not going to… If people aren’t coming to me, then I don’t want to go to them.”

 

0:25:43.7 Jim Lovelady: Right. Reminds me of Philippians 2. He who did not consider equality with God a thing to lord over others, but made Himself a servant, humbled Himself even unto death. So when you think about like, He didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped or to lord over, it’s like, yeah, Jesus lived in a really great place, He had a really great house, and He decided to move to the slums for you. And it’s more than that. It’s more, way more sophisticated than like, He had a nice place and He was the King and He had everything He could ever want. And it was like, no, I want to engage in the state of aloneness that my people have experienced and I want to liberate them from that. So it’s way more sophisticated than just He left His home in Heaven.

 

0:26:39.4 Bill Smith: It is more sophisticated. It’s not less. But both of those really I think are astounding. You think, okay, knowing the little bit I know about how hard it is to live on this planet, would I have any interest if I had the option?

 

0:26:52.9 Jim Lovelady: Right. Right.

 

0:26:54.3 Bill Smith: No. Actually, that one’s… That’s one of the easier questions to answer, which says my love is kind of small.

 

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0:27:08.7 Jim Lovelady: I want to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we here at the headquarters in Philadelphia are praying for each week. We meet on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pray, and this week we’re praying for our teams in Thailand. But I know many of our Serge field workers serve in lonely, remote places, physically, spiritually, and socially isolated. And I know we have folks in bustling cities who feel a certain kind of isolation. If you know of someone who might be experiencing this kind of aloneness, email them, text them, or call them and let them know your prayer for them today. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that You would bless these folks as they serve in some often lonely places. Show them even now how You are a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Give them joy in their work in Your Kingdom and the pleasure of Your joy as they follow You. Give them wisdom and let Your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members and children, and with the people that they serve. Heal all sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, and restore to them the joy of Your salvation. And let Your Kingdom come and Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. In all of these places, we pray in Your name. Amen. Now back to the conversation. 

 

0:28:48.7 Jim Lovelady: You’re a pastor, I’m a pastor. We’re shepherding people who experience loneliness. And so, apart from the philosophical and the theological mystery of being brought into the divine and being brought into the koinonia of the community of faith and being made part of the body of Christ, how do you talk to people who say, “Hey, Pastor, I’ve just been really lonely”? How do you approach that question for someone?

 

0:29:13.6 Bill Smith: Boy, there’s probably a lot of different ways you’d want to do that, right? One of the easy ones would be, that would make you normal. That is a shared part of what it is to be a broken human being.

 

0:29:32.1 Jim Lovelady: Hey, you’re not alone in that.

 

0:29:33.3 Bill Smith: Exactly, exactly. And anytime I can do that kind of little, let me take your world and help you see it a little bit bigger, I think that can be helpful. If you go from there to, here’s an amazing God who enters into that, obviously you don’t do that in a five-minute conversation, but here’s a God who has entered into exactly where you are. Why? Because He couldn’t stand for you to be there by yourself. Couldn’t stand is the negative way of saying it. You want to be careful.

 

0:30:07.1 Jim Lovelady: For the joy set before Him.

 

0:30:08.9 Bill Smith: There you go. Yeah. There’s a reason he came, and it was for you. It was to bring you in. Is it out of His own neediness? No, it’s out of His own fullness and wanting you to share in that. Well, does that mean now that you’re happy? Not necessarily. Some of the chapters that I go through are how do you mourn? How do you grieve the brokenness where you often find yourself alone?

 

0:30:36.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, my favorite chapter of the book was how do you suffer well when you’re feeling alienated? How do you suffer well in being alone and in how you… You talk about the story of Anna, who’s been a widow from a young age, and she served in the temple and she went about the work waiting, longing, alone, suffering. So I just really appreciated that take, that the experience of loneliness and the state of being alone and enduring through that and wrestling with that is a type of suffering. And Jesus sees that. This is all part of the fellowship and the sufferings of Christ. We’re participating with Him as we suffer. Anyway, so I just really appreciated that chapter. I don’t remember, it was toward the end.

 

0:31:36.1 Bill Smith: Yeah. It’s that sense of wanting very hard not to say, come to Jesus and your life will be wonderful.

 

0:31:45.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:31:46.7 Bill Smith: No, you’ll have infinite resources to deal with a hard life, but that doesn’t mean that life is not hard. I’m stunned by Anna. So much of her world is so broken. God says so very little about her, and it is just this active wrestling with God through that, not so that she can get another husband.

 

0:32:09.2 Jim Lovelady: Right, right.

 

0:32:10.4 Bill Smith: Or, you know…

 

0:32:12.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. That’s not the end of her story.

 

0:32:13.2 Bill Smith: No, it’s, I have seen the redemption of the Lord. That’s been the whole goal. Like you had said earlier, it’s that symptom that stirs me to want to press into the Lord, and it makes me aware He has resources. He has a good thing for me to find in this. And I want that more than I want to stop feeling the symptom.

 

0:32:37.2 Jim Lovelady: So I don’t remember when I told you this, if I told you this online or offline, but your book for me was an invitation to prayer and to wrestle with Jesus. So that when I start to experience the loneliness of being misunderstood, that’s a pretty common one, feeling misunderstood, feeling ignored or overlooked, or any of the other things that could make us feel that experience of loneliness, immediately it was this reminder of, the Lord is with you. Tell Him. Jesus, I feel lonely. Jesus, I don’t feel like anybody understands. Jesus, I feel like I’m really smart, but the words when they come out of my mouth are all wrong and everyone’s misunderstanding me. I feel like I’m being overlooked. I feel like everybody else is getting the blah, blah, blah and I’m not. All of these things that make me feel isolated and alienated and marginalized. And that experience for me is going to be different from that experience from anybody else, the same… The invitation is all the same. Jesus, this is how I feel. And so I appreciated that there just seemed to be, well, you had a little prayer at the end of every chapter that was kind of nudging me toward that. So I appreciate that. Maybe this is just kind of like the beginning of a journey for me as I’m exploring more of the ways that I experience loneliness and everything, but the solution seems to be the same. But beyond that, where would you take someone? “Hey, you wrestle with Jesus.” What are some other steps that…

 

0:34:26.3 Bill Smith: Yeah, I think there is that personal piece, but then there’s also the awareness that God has given you resources. And the biggest one is He’s put you in a family. It’s not always the family you want.

  

0:34:39.6 Jim Lovelady: Truly. Truly.

 

0:34:41.2 Bill Smith: It’s astounding to me. There’s that one verse that I unpack for a while: “God puts the lonely in families.” Six words that are just really, really rich.

 

0:34:55.1 Jim Lovelady: Where is that? It’s a psalm?

 

0:34:55.2 Bill Smith: Yeah. It’s one of the Psalms.

 

0:34:56.1 Jim Lovelady: I’ll look it up.

 

0:34:57.1 Bill Smith: 68:6 or 86:8, something like that. He doesn’t find affinity groups for you. He doesn’t find…

 

0:35:09.8 Jim Lovelady: Which is the solution, that’s the solution that everybody says.

 

0:35:12.1 Bill Smith: Absolutely.

 

0:35:12.2 Jim Lovelady: Hey, if you’re feeling lonely, go join a club with your interests.

 

0:35:16.2 Bill Smith: Or, find your soulmate, someone who just gets you. And God’s like, yeah, no, actually, I’ll put you in a family. And you know what family’s like. These are the ones you got.

 

0:35:27.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:35:28.6 Bill Smith: So you’re supposed to figure out, how do I get enough from the Lord in order to give to them in a way that they need? And it’s that constant dependency on the Lord in order to pour out into others. It’s just healthy and fruitful. And yes, you’re on the receiving end of that as well. It’s been good. Different churches I’ve been part of, all very different. Different elders, very, very different. But learning how to, okay, these are the elders, to learn how to love and to learn to be loved by and to enter into, all right, Lord, what are you doing here and what are you building?

 

0:36:05.8 Jim Lovelady: And I got to be honest, it’s a scary one, because it’s like, I’m going to participate with this family, so I’m going to put myself out there. And of all the places where it should be the easiest and safest place to put yourself out there, seems like over and over again, it is a dangerous place to put yourself out there. So there, answer me that, Bill.

  

0:36:35.6 Bill Smith: If Jesus had not put Himself there first, there’s no way I’d be willing to do that. I look at myself, I look at our brothers and sisters, and I have to remind myself regularly Jesus did not go to the cross for the possibility that we might be a little nicer. But He really did go to the cross and rise from the dead and ascend into Heaven for the guarantee that we are going to be pure and holy just like Him. There’s a long road between here and there, but it’s a definite, and that’s where we’re all going.

 

0:37:06.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, this is our destiny.

 

0:37:07.9 Bill Smith: Yeah.

 

0:37:08.4 Jim Lovelady: Okay. I’m going to give it a shot because it’s my destiny, because it’s been… It is an assurance. This is not like a, hey, if you give it a shot, maybe it’ll work.

 

0:37:18.5 Bill Smith: Maybe it’ll work out.

 

0:37:20.3 Jim Lovelady: Uh-uh.

 

0:37:20.4 Bill Smith: No, it’s give it a shot and you might get… You might take a couple of shots.

 

0:37:25.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:37:26.2 Bill Smith: Actually, you probably will.

 

0:37:27.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. For years and years and years.

 

0:37:28.9 Bill Smith: You could. And you and I have history. We could share a lot of those. But it’s the bride of Christ. She’s going to be absolutely dazzling and radiant, and none of us are going to be upset at seeing anyone else in Heaven. I think the reverse is going to be the case where we see that person we’ve struggled with for sometimes decades and think, I get to be in the same room with him or her. What Jesus has planned for His people is beyond what we’ve given Him credit for.

 

0:38:01.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, give it a shot. Put yourself out there. And when you get shot down, there is, you have a Savior who knows what happened and is experiencing the anger toward the powers and principalities of darkness that are threatening His child. And He’s with you and He’s redeeming. So run back to Him, go home. And yeah, this is the… I mean, once again, it’s like it’s always this, the gospel renews us and sends us on mission.

 

0:38:39.1 Bill Smith: Yes. Yes.

 

0:38:41.4 Jim Lovelady: And it’s just kind of the… It’s the cadence of this podcast is that gospel renewal sends you on mission. Going on mission drives you back to needing the gospel.

 

0:38:49.5 Bill Smith: Absolutely.

 

0:38:49.6 Jim Lovelady: And so these two things that we have of the intimate relationship and fellowship with Jesus and the body of Christ, and then others. Move out toward others in whatever next other there is. Just move toward them. Discover in moving toward them that it really is really hard to love, and you’re going to get burned, and it’s going to make you feel alone. And well, you just go back to Jesus and then He’ll show you how to do it a little bit better or a little bit different next time. And just keep doing that for the rest of your life.

 

0:39:25.0 Bill Smith: I’m pretty sure it’s II Timothy, right? Where Paul says, “Everyone deserted me at my trial, but the Lord stood by me.” And you read with the book with that awareness and you’re like, this is a positive, upbeat book. If I’m writing, yeah, everybody deserted me. All of the churches I planted, all of the guys that I discipled, all of the people that I poured my life out for, all of the things that I wrote that are going to be in the New Testament, if everyone deserts me, I’m probably not upbeat. And Paul is. And he gives you the reason, “The Lord didn’t. The Lord stood by me.” It’s think, okay, can I get a hold of a little bit of that? Just different way of saying I think what you just did.

 

0:40:09.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, maybe this is the last question. It’s something like, I just know that there are people who are watching or listening who, maybe they’re watching or listening at 2:00 AM because they’re lonely and they want to throw the… I come up on their podcast, Grace at the Fray’s next in the queue or whatever, and maybe I could fall asleep or listening to podcasts and just not feel so lonely or… So what do you say to someone who just feels so profoundly alone and they’re convinced that nobody really knows them, and nobody would miss them if they were gone, and they’re not even sure if God is close. What would you say to them?

 

0:41:02.9 Bill Smith: Go back to the cross. That’s the loneliest place I’ve ever thought about. Jesus is not part of the human community. He’s raised up above them. He’s not part of the Heavenly community. He’s below. He’s right in the middle, and He’s all by Himself. And it’s not good enough for people that He’s just going to die there. They have to make His ending as miserable as they possibly can. Everything that they say to Him doesn’t speed it up, doesn’t slow it down. It’s just for the sake of hurting one more… You look at that, and it’s impossible for me not to think about the Day of Atonement, way back in the Old Testament there’s two rams, two goats. One goat is offered up as a sacrifice to make atonement for people’s sins. The other goat, people… The priests place their hands on, symbolically transferring people’s sin to that goat, and then that goat is released into the wilderness on its own. You look at the cross and you realize that’s what Jesus is doing. He’s bearing people’s sin away that keeps them from each other, it keeps… because it keeps them from Him. The more you look at Him, the more your heart is warmed because you cannot be. And you realize, here’s a God who hates your aloneness more than you do. You’ll listen to Grace at the Fray to try to go to sleep. He did a whole lot more…for you. I think you start there.

 

0:42:56.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So if you’re listening to that at 2:00 AM, sleep well. Jesus loves you. The name of your book is a pretty good name, You Are Not Alone. And however much I may want to believe the lie that I’m an orphan, that I’ve been orphaned, Jesus says, “I have not left you as orphans.” However much I want to believe that lie and kind of sulk, for my part, it’s a sulking. Other people, it’s all sorts of ramifications of experiencing that loneliness, but for me, it’s like a sulking of nobody gets me, nobody understands. My repentance isn’t just, Jesus, I’m sorry I believed in that lie. Help me to believe that I am not alone, that you are with me. It’s more than that. It’s, that’s… Because that’s still a little bit me focused. It’s, help me to see what you have done. Help me to see that you hate my aloneness more than I thought that I hated my aloneness. And it pulls us out of ourselves. How do you see the victory of the resurrection in all of this? And I read that a lot of it is kind of referring to what you wrote at the very end of your book, but how do you see the victory of the resurrection as this like, it’s not just that He won, it’s that he won decisively, and that this victory over your aloneness is, He has made His enemies his footstool. He has made your aloneness His footstool. Talk to me about the victory of the resurrection in all of this?

 

0:44:51.4 Bill Smith: There’s that passage in Romans 8 where nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And then Paul goes on to talk about all these different examples and basically says nothing in creation. And he’s right. Not even death can separate us from God’s love. So it’s not like, again, God’s love might get you a little bit closer to Him. It’s no, it’s guaranteed. The resurrection is the guarantee. It’s the absolute nothing stronger than this God. He loves you more than He loved his own life, and now He has his life back. If He would rather let go of His life than let go of you and comes back from the dead, He’s not letting go of you. It’s guaranteed.

 

0:45:42.8 Jim Lovelady: Amen. What do you hope for somebody after they’ve read your book and wrestled with Jesus with your book? What’s your hope? What’s your hope for people?

 

0:45:52.3 Bill Smith: A little more optimism in God, a little less skepticism about themselves.

 

0:45:57.6 Jim Lovelady: That’s good. Well, I’m very grateful that you wrote a book on loneliness and that the title is a continual reminder. You are not alone. You’re not alone. We’re not alone. So thanks, man.

 

0:46:15.7 Bill Smith: Thanks for the conversation.

 

[music]

 

0:46:24.5 Jim Lovelady: I love how Bill doesn’t say, you feel alone, but you’re not, so stop feeling that way. Stop it. Let’s get something straight. God’s not mad at you for feeling lonely. He’s mad at the state of aloneness that comes with broken humanity, and He wants to tear down the idols that make false promises to fix our aloneness. Here’s my takeaway from this conversation. It was a refreshing surprise for me to see God’s tenderness and grace to the plight of humanity that experiences the state of aloneness. And somehow the antidote to loneliness is actually through the path of being aware and experiencing my own aloneness. This is where I will experience the fullness of Christ in a way that I can’t apart from being in fellowship with the sufferings of Christ. I can’t avoid my aloneness. I got to go through it with Jesus. I need to follow Him. So remember, Jesus left home, left His community, and entered the loneliness of being the God man because… All because He hates your aloneness more than you do. Jesus was stuck in the loneliest place on the cross, isolated from humanity and forsaken by God so that in His resurrection He would bring about a new reality where the dwelling place of God is with humanity. And it’s this tender grace that beckons me to turn away from all the coping mechanisms that I’ve been using to try and make myself feel just a little bit less lonely. Jesus tenderly invites me to forsake my idols and enjoy fellowship with Him, seek to love others. So instead of seeking to feel understood, even feel known and loved, I want to seek to understand others and to show the love of God to them because that’s where fellowship with God is found. And what’s left is the normal struggle, right? But now it’s with the friend who sticks closer than a brother. It’s not that Jesus threw a rope down the well of your loneliness and then dragged you out. It’s that He jumped in to be alone with you and bring you out. I heard a story about a man who was walking down a city street and he fell into a manhole. And a doctor walked by and he looked down at the man’s plight and he wrote him a prescription and tossed it into the hole. And then a priest walked by and looked down at the man’s plight and then he wrote him a prayer and tossed it into the hole. And then his friend walked by and jumped in. “Why’d you do that? Now we’re both here stuck.” “Well, I’ve been here before and I know the way out.” Everyone needs a companion on their journey of faith. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo needed Samwise, right? He never would have made it without his Sam. And if you’re feeling discouraged, isolated, alienated and alone, we want to come alongside you. The Serge Renewal team loves to do this. I want you to join us for our Gospel Centered Life mini retreats where you can come and be yourself and learn just how much the Lord loves you and how Jesus’ resurrection is real for your life. We’re offering two retreats this autumn. The first is in Pittsburgh, September 11th through 12th, right around the corner at Hebron Church. And I’ll leave a link in the show notes for how you can register for that one. And the second is in the DC area, November 6th and 7th, and I’ll be at that one and I’d love to see you there. So again, link in the show notes, go register for that. And now we have lots of resources on our website that are all meant to encourage you that you’re not alone in your journey of faith. And I’ll leave a link for a book called The Gospel-Centered Community and a blog post that goes with it called, “Created for Community, Redeemed for Community.” And it’s a great accompaniment to this conversation that I had with Bill Smith. And of course, you got to go pick up his book and use it as a prayer guide and let Bill be your companion as he guides you in exploring the reality that you are not alone. Did I say it yet? Go check out the show notes for all of this. So as you go to love others, to come alongside and minister to the lonely, as you seek to understand and love before you seek to be understood and to be loved, remember the blessing of God is with you. So receive it now. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you, turn His bright eyes to you, and give you His peace. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, life everlasting. Amen.

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