It seems that sometimes God stops us in our tracks and fills us with the deafening thunder of loneliness. Real-time, raw, gritty loneliness.

You don’t have anyone your age at church to talk with. You emailed your mentor but she’s too busy to reply. You feel trapped and stressed with conditions at work and have no one safe to talk it through with you.

Many times, loneliness is God’s invitation. It’s when He stills you enough so that you can hear Him saying “Press hard into Me. Can you tell Me about it? I call the stars out by name and I know your feelings of isolation and I’m big enough to take what you’re feeling.”

The wonder of this invitation is that we can never ask too much of Him. We can never confide in Him too much, or ask for His presence too often. We don’t even have to articulate the Sehnsuht in our soul, but only breathe “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” and He understands what’s underneath the breaths.

Loneliness drives us all to different places—self-soothing to forget the ache, a stranger’s arms or fantasy for comfort, hard work or delirious pleasure to distract, stoicism or denial to appear strong and not-needy.

But as long as we stay strong and distracted and numb, we will never experience the fullness and depth and width of God’s comfort and companionship, which is the truest, deepest intimacy He created for us.

And Jesus knows something about loneliness, so His words aren’t just theory. He gets it when you tell Him you’re lonely. He had no strong co-worker with whom to debrief His frustrations with people. He never knew the comfort of coming home to a woman’s warmth. For all we know, His times of solitude included hours of wordless breaths of “Father, Father, Father.”

Loneliness, the deep, dark cavern, instructs us. It tells us—when we listen—that we’re not as alone as it feels. Loneliness sharpens our sensitivity to others who hurt and smart even more acutely than we. This is a most healing, positive discovery because it lifts our eyes off ourselves and urges us to look up and out.

I had lunch one day with three women. All live in different states, all of them are married to leaders who are gifted visionaries. These women partner with their husbands to serve and pour out their lives on behalf of the Kingdom. They are intelligent and talented and full of life, and over our extended lunch, we laughed and cried and asked questions and heard each other’s stories of the past year.

What eventually came dripping out of all our eyes, in different moments and stories, was how each lady feels profoundly lonely. I was the youngest of the four, single, living in an isolated mission, and loneliness understandably goes with that package. But them? These witty, positive personalities, with attentive husbands and beautiful children?

Yes, them.

No place or person on earth will protect anyone from isolation, misunderstanding, loneliness. The stubborn existential loneliness is a clingy cat that’s constantly underfoot and we keep kicking into it even when we think it’s gone.

While we can let loneliness work for us and follow the nudgings toward the eternal and infinite, we can also choose to stay in a dangerous no-man’s land. In that terrain, the enemy’s taunts feel completely plausible.

“You’re here because no one likes you. They don’t like you because you’re too intense, shy, emotional, boring, threatening. Look at you—who would actually enjoy you? Time you get yourself into shape like everyone else.”

When you hear these lies, your best option is to RUN. Run, gasping only for Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. He will repel the dark lies with His light and the words you need to hear.

Do you know someone who’s listening to those toxic lies? Take their hand and run with them. Run with confidence to the comfort and light of Truth. The truth is that He is never far away, and He’s always waiting to respond to your call for help. This truth frees you and lights a flame in the darkness that could suffocate you.

While everyone grapples with existential loneliness, often singles carry a pronounced, practical loneliness. It’s important to recognize this and be honest about how heavy it feels to make major decisions alone and absorb inter-personal pressures alone and go to sleep alone every night. Alone was not how we were designed to live and it makes life hard.

But many, many others are even more profoundly lonely. I think of abandoned wives, and mothers with chronically ill or handicapped family members, or women who married unwisely. I think of widows and women with unbelieving husbands and I should probably stop listing categories now because there’s many others I’m missing. Palpable loneliness can tend to overwhelm people and skew their perspective of life and God. Could it be that you can be comfort to them? That you can carry or speak or paint or bake a token of God’s presence for them?

Your loneliness can help someone else’s loneliness? Who knew! God’s economics are wonderful and nothing is ever wasted.

We carry His presence, you know. In a stroke of wild vulnerability, He put His Spirit in us to ignore or treasure at will. The Spirit is the Comforter, the One who comes along-side. He is safety and light and truth, and He tents in us. We take Him with us into our world—the world full of lies and arrows and the tears of Sehnsuht.

The Sunday school answer is still the only enduring answer. Could it be that you, carrying the treasure of Himself, are part of the answer to someone who’s crying “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus?”

“I understand your loneliness,” he told me.

I was in a meeting to discuss an issue at school. It morphed into a conversation where three people were telling me how their spouses help give them perspective and advice about their issues and idiosyncrasies. I said I have no one like they do to lean on and ask for insights when I’m puzzled, so I feel very alone.

When he said he understands my loneliness, I wanted to shake my head and wail, “But you just told me your wife helps you with your blind spots, and you know I’m single—how can you understand?”

But I stayed quiet and did my best to pour grace into his words.

My gentle friend went on to say that even their healthy marriage carries an emptiness in its core. The cave inside doesn’t mean something’s wrong with the relationship. It’s just the way things are.

Later, it came to me: I’d been talking about my practical, tangible loneliness, and he was talking about existential loneliness, so I had felt like we weren’t understanding each other.

Existential loneliness, I’ve learned, is the ache of emptiness that caverns inside every human. It’s the thirst after every pleasure and the whimper at every dream come true.

There’s an old German word, Sehnsuht, that explains it best to me. Everyone feels it, but it seems only the bravest, most honest writers, artists, and composers try to express it. They explain it as the inconsolable longing for a place you haven’t seen but know as home. You could call it nostalgia, or homesickness, except that it’s the reverse of that, a hungering for a place we haven’t been to yet. The emotion is so profound and intense that sometimes we’re aware of the ache, but don’t even know what we’re aching for.

Sehnsuht is the tendency to demand presence and availability from someone who can never ever be big and wonderful and sensitive enough to fill the holes in your soul. It’s the drive to go further and longer and higher into uncharted horizons because maybe just out there is the place that will fully soothe your soul. It’s what keeps you talking and discussing and pushing for concepts that solve all your dilemmas perfectly.

The Sunday school answer to this insatiable thirst is that Jesus satisfies it. Happily, it’s true, but it can be hard sometimes to know or experience how it’s true.

God, in His inscrutable design, created us with this cavernous loneliness without creating something that fills the cavern. Only He, the Infinite, can fill to overflowing, satisfy, and soothe the Sehnsuht He gave us.

God also thought up countless creative, beautiful ways for us to live whole, full, rich lives. We are awake to textures, colors, sounds, flavors, memories, dreams that constantly entwine with incredible, gifted, winsome, deep, whimsical people around us.

But Sehnsuht still haunts us.

I read an interview of a playwright who said, “All the best stories have to do with loneliness.” We connect best with what what’s been our experience, and everyone has experienced loneliness, so the stories that include that theme are the ones that become enduring. Sehnsuht crept out of the theater stage and connected with this playwright’s audiences because it connects with every human.

You’ve seen the same hunger demonstrated in your friends in their life choices, in the characters in your favorite novels, and the lyrics of your go-to music. Many people can’t put Sehnsuht into words, but Bono was brave enough to call it for what it is when he sang “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

The search drives alive, sensitive people to breathtaking thrills. I can’t scorn the lady who endlessly pursues expensive exercise regimens and takes any man who gives her attention. Or the man who loses himself in games and adrenaline. Their search is part of being human, alive, and honest about their thirst. But they short-circuit the search when they settle for something less than Infinity.

This post concludes tomorrow.