So, I'm not really sure what I'm writting here so bear with me. I'm really struggling in my life. I'm in my late 20's and struggling to work due to health problems. I'm also really struggling with isolation. I'm sociable but I don't have many friends, and even fewer of faith. However that I can handle alright. Whats frustrating is my lack of a love life.
I'm not a young man anymore, but I understand the strain of a weakened body interfering with gainful employment. And when I was your age, I was a very isolated person. Oh, I had plenty of acquaintances and friends of circumstance - you know, those people you interact with socially due to some common interest or necessity but
only within the context of that interest or necessity. None of these sorts of friends ever entered my home, or knew anything of me and my life beyond the narrow confines of where my life intersected with theirs. Like you, I had even fewer friendships with fellow Christians. Though I was a believer, it was hardest to connect socially with those in my church, with fellow believers. How strange that is, eh? It's not much different today, I'm afraid. Thank God, I've changed, though, by His grace and power, and now find all I need relationally in Him. He really is "one who sticks closer than a brother."
I didn't marry 'til I was 39. I would've married much earlier, but that just didn't happen. It was...difficult and became increasingly a problem for me until, in my mid-thirties, I was so unhappy in my singleness that I became insomniac, and anxious, and deeply, chronically depressed. My unhappiness was so profound I ended up in hospital with the feeling like I couldn't draw breath properly, like I was suffocating. It turned out, that despite what I felt, there was nothing wrong physically. The emergency physician suggested I seek out some psychiatric help.
Since I was a Christian, I turned instead to God for help. I prayed, asking Him to reveal what was going on within me. God answered immediately, bringing to mind my unhappiness at the unmarried state I was in and how much I had made this a token of the general pathetic-ness of my life. Over the next few months, I had to root out a series of well-entrenched lies I had adopted about myself, my life, and God, coming to rest finally and genuinely in the truth that God was enough; not a wife, not a bunch of kids, not a great career, not a cottage at the lake, just God. He was what I really needed, what would fulfill me in a way none of these other things possibly could and bring me into the life for which I had been created.
And then, a short time later, I was married. Funny that, eh?
How about you? What's your view of God, and your relationship to Him? Have you embraced some falsehoods about you and Him that need to be rejected?
I feel like I can't ever really be myself around people. I feel like I'm not understood at all by most people.
This is going to sound very...counter-culture, but God isn't interested in you being
yourself. Instead, His goal is to make you more and more like Jesus (
Romans 8:29). He intends that you be His vessel in and through whom He communicates
Himself - not you - to others.
2 Timothy 2:20-21
20 Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable.
21 Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.
Romans 6:22
22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
You were made to be a "vessel," a "slave of God," and cannot know the fulfillment, and peace, and joy of being what you were made to be until you yield yourself to this purpose. Will you anchor yourself in this purpose for your life, not in marriage, or a robust social sphere, or what the world calls success?
It takes me to some dark places sometimes, I have no illusions that finding a wife would make my life easier. That said, loneliness comes from not having close ties with other people. There is no affection in my life at all. Its been years since I was hugged by someone who wasn't a family member.
I'm just tired and don't know what to do.
Yup. I know what it's like. I would go days at a time without saying a word. There was no one to talk to. And the distraction of the internet and video games didn't exist back then. But, God waits in the silence and isolation for us to turn to Him so He can lead us into the abundant life He made us for - and that we can
only find in going deep with Him. Do you believe this? Will you believe it?
Hebrews 11:6
6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
Psalm 16:11
11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
John 10:9-11
9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.
10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.