in the words of Eleanor Rigby.

I’m cutting the bullshit.

After traveling around the world this past year as a missionary, serving the broken and the oppressed, trying to find a meaning to it all, do you know what I’ve found to be the world’s biggest problem?

It wasn’t poverty.

It wasn’t fatherlessness.

It wasn’t abuse.

It wasn’t homelessness.

It wasn’t government oppression.

It wasn’t God-lessness.

It was loneliness. 

We learn at a young age that we’re lonely.  We spend years pacifying ourselves with distractions to quell the ache.  It seems like a superficial problem at first – trying to make friends on the playground, popularity contests, making sure you have the latest toy, gadget, or style.  Then we wonder why these feelings, this need to be known, accepted, liked, and loved, never go away.  Here comes adolescence, like a raging hailstorm, where you realize that perhaps this loneliness can be solved through other means.  Perhaps a man or a woman can make you happy?  Like finding the right puzzle piece, life becomes a larger allegory to physical and mental foreplay.  If only you can reach that climax and finally destroy that beast of loneliness. 

Of course, that doesn’t work, because that person lets you down. 

They break your trust, treat you wrongly. 

They’re lonely too, and you destroy one another, knowing that you’re fighting the same battle, but not knowing how to fight together.

Here we are now, through a series of trial and error, bitterness welling up in our hearts, and scratching so hard at the itching emptiness that we bleed and bruise resentment, anger, and regret.

Now what?

We swallow the loneliness, making it into something manageable, digestible, and tolerable.  Let’s blog.  Let me be your friend, click accept.  Look at my photos.  Like me, please?  Read my opinions.  Listen to me.  Watch me on YouTube.  Please.  Please, please? 

We create this delicate guise that we’re better off when we’re independent.

Reliance on others is weak, and dependence is weak.  The brokenness in our pasts screams seclusion, withdrawal, and solitude, figuring things out on our own.

Yet, independence, is just another glamorized form of loneliness. 

Is that the way we were supposed to live?

Absolutely not.

We were created for relationship.  We were created to be dependent.  When we ignore that necessity in our hearts, we trap ourselves in a cruel cycle. So that loneliness you feel?  The feeling of restlessness and the inability to be comfortable with who you are and how others see you?  It’s a longing to be with your Creator God– the only person who knows you inside and out.  It’s okay to be dependent on Him.  It’s okay to need people, too, because He didn’t create us all the same.  Each and every one of us have different stories, different gifts, different perspectives, and it’s because we’re meant to help one another.  We are not meant to go at this alone.

If you don’t believe me, then I only wish that I could describe to you what it felt like to stand in a crowded chapel, smelling of dust and lilies, on the day of Rachelle’s funeral to hear her mother weep through a broken heart to a room-full of her friends saying, “Rachelle, look at all the people who loved you.”  

Our brokenness lends us to a life that is so fleeting.  You will never get any of it back.  The wisest of men have always known this, as David prayed in Psalms, "Show me, oh Lord, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how frail I am."

Are you choosing to do it alone?  Do you think you're strong enough?  Do you find those who have stood beside you dispensable?  Are you strong enough to admit that you can't do it alone?