Surrounded in Isolation: The Truth About Loneliness

By Natalie Braine

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For the last couple years, I have been living under a rock. 

Thankfully not literally, because I don’t bode well with creepy crawlies and slime, but a metaphorical rock. 

I went to public school for kindergarten through grade 5, but I was traditionally homeschooled all throughout middle school. My only contact with people my own age was a once-a-week theater class that met for two hours on Tuesday night. (And Church, of course.) Other than that, I was pretty isolated from my peers. It was just me at home with my parents and little siblings. 

Then, for eighth grade, my Mom noticed my loneliness (the extrovert in me was suffering) and decided to stick me in a school-sized homeschool tutorial, just for a couple elective classes two days a week. 

I’m telling you, aside from being saved, meeting my best friend, and becoming a writer, joining that tutorial is the best thing that ever happened to me. 

I got to actually hang out with people my age for several hours, every week! 

While I met people SUPER similar to me and developed a solid gaggle of friends, something soon stuck out to me. 

I didn’t know anything about being a teenager. 

As in, I didn’t know any of the slang, icons, or hobbies that basically defined my peers’ lives. I didn’t know who JVKE is until eighth grade, I couldn’t figure out what a “karen” was for the life of me, and apparently I was the only person who couldn’t list five Taylor Swift songs off the top of my head. To this day, I still ask the question, “What’s a ‘sigma’?” 

While I was surrounded by people, I was alone in a way. And even though I was perfectly fine being countercultural (2000’s slang is the only way to go,) I didn’t want to be left out, either. I convinced myself that it was a bad thing to not be like the people around me. 

Yes, I actually was asked if I lived under a rock. 

While you can probably school me in matters of Taylor Swift music, I know you can relate to that story above. You probably have one of your own that could have taken its place. Everyone who’s ever existed on the planet has felt a feeling of loneliness (even Christ Himself!). And it seems to be on a rampage among teenagers today. 

SO many teenagers today suffer from anxiety and depression, and loneliness is both a cause and a symptom of these issues. And the thing that has the church confused is that these problems are not confined to the secular community. Tons of Christian teenagers suffer from chronic loneliness. This has the church asking

“why?” After all, the fruit of the Holy Spirit in us is love, joy, peace… the list goes on. How is it possible for teenagers growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ suffer in such a way? 

I want to clarify one thing that’s true for all Christians everywhere: just because you have the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean that things will be easy. It certainly doesn’t mean that the enemy will stop attacking you. Not all negative emotions are enemy attacks, mind you, but the point still stands. Life will always be hard, it’s just a fact of life. I myself have dealt with spiritual warfare in my own experience, and I’ve been a believer since I was four years old. Just because I have struggled with that doesn’t make me any less saved, and your struggles don’t define your identity. 

Contrary to popular belief, God’s job isn’t to make us happy or comfortable. I know this might be shocking to some people, considering that the Christian pop media is really pushing this idea (I’m looking at you, Forrest Frank), but God is not humanity’s butler. God’s goal is to draw us closer to Himself, which He often does through allowing us to suffer. Christ did, and so will his followers. It’s not that God delights in our suffering, it’s that He is training us to delight in Him despite our suffering. So the idea that if we have the Holy Spirit everything in our lives is gonna be great is downright unbiblical. The Apostle Paul suffered greatly because of his faith, yet He was still able to be content (2 Corinthians 2:10). 

I believe that a chief cause of this loneliness epidemic among Christian teens is simply that Christ has less value in a lot of teenagers’ lives. Obviously, this isn’t the case for a lot, hopefully even most, of my brothers and sisters, but I have made an observation that a good number of teenagers lead “double lives”, so to speak, when it comes to faith. They might read their Bible and pray before bed every day, but they’re viewed more like your average chore than a crucial part of their life. Spending time with God is just as important as brushing your teeth. Maybe chat with Him once or twice a day (twice if you want to have extra minty breath *cough* excuse me, strong faith), then move on with your life. Jesus, life, rinse, repeat. And, I admit, I struggle with this as well. We were created to love God and the things of God. Without the Holy Spirit, because of sin, we don’t do either of those things. As C.S. Lewis insightfully pointed out, God doesn’t keep telling us to praise Him so much because God needs it; God keeps telling us to praise Him because delighting in Him so much that we can’t shut up about it is what WE really, deeply need. 

Page 1 of the enemy’s playbook is distracting us with things we love more than God. When we’re not focused on Christ, we’re not fulfilling the role we were born to play, which can lead to loneliness and discontent. When Christ isn’t the center of your life, the enemy takes the prime opportunity of that hole in your heart and fills it with lies and deception. 

Lies such as, “you are alone.” 

Yes, loneliness is a lie. 

Feelings can be great liars, as Eugene Peterson famously said. We live in an age where a person’s feelings are considered the end-all decision-maker. Once you realize you’re experiencing a feeling, then that’s really the true you. This is one of the few instances where I’d respond with the phrase “what the sigma?!” 

Sometimes your feelings are lying to you. But how can we decipher when they are or when they aren’t?

Well, our emotions don’t determine our identity. If they did, then I would have about a billion alter egos running around, because I experience TONS of emotions every day. And so do you and every other person on the planet. So if emotions can’t determine our identity, what can? In this situation, whoever is baptized into Christ is a new creation – we’re talking absolute identity change. The old has gone, the new has come. It’s who you are now. Feelings might or might not be telling you the truth. Don’t put too much into them. They don’t control you. 

However, for those who aren’t in Christ, not believing upon His name (John 1), not baptized into Christ, then yeah, they must believe loneliness to be the truth. Because what’s life without God? 

God is always and will always be right beside us. As it says in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 31, “it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.” For more proof, you could look in the tail end of Matthew, closing the first book of the New Testament with the powerful phrase, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Or take the famous line from Joshua 1, “Do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” I could fill up the rest of this article with verses like these. Even if the rest of the world deserts us, God never will. 

Praise the Lord that He is always ready and willing to draw us closer to Him. It breaks my heart that so many teenagers my own age have forgotten this truth. Because if you don’t have Christ, what can you turn to for comfort? 

If there’s anything I know about humanity, it’s that we love finding things that please us more than God does. Isn’t that what idolatry is? Every generation has their idols, and I know you know what I’m going to say Gen Z’s is. 

Screens. 

More specifically, the things that affect us through those screens. I get it, not everything we do on our phones or laptops affects us deeply (I don’t know anyone who’s ever been seriously damaged because of their Algebra homework), but the things we absorb casually often tend to affect us more than we think. Social media and celebrity culture have transformed the world we live in and the lives of the people who live in it. A lot of teenagers are so addicted to social media that they can barely go a couple hours without instinctually checking instagram. So it’s no surprise that when teenagers get attacked spiritually, often our phones feel closer than the God who saves us. Screens are great servants, but terrible masters. 

Now, I’m not saying “PHONES ARE EVIL AND EVERYONE MUST CAST THIERS INTO A GIANT PIT OF LAVA”, but I just want to warn people that what we let into our hearts and minds affects us, and we have to be mindful of what we consume. It doesn’t even have to be social media that transforms us. It can be music (even Christian music!), books, TV, anything that sticks in your brain. 

That’s the thing with lies. To run away from one lie, we often turn to another one to be our savior. Have we not all fallen prey to this trap? The internet is a prime example of this, especially since almost the entirety of digital media is curated to show us things we want to see, not what is. We want the lies it shows us. We crave

them. That’s just the way the Enemy works. And those lies make us feel more alone, causing us to need more of them, and the cycle repeats. Loneliness truly is a spiral. 

And once lies weasel their way into our hearts, we begin to suffer. We were made for truth, dear friend, and the whole purpose of the enemy is to isolate us from the source of all Truth, God Himself. The crazy thing is, Satan doesn’t stop there. He not only isolates us from God, but he also makes us isolate ourselves from others. He makes us think we’re the only ones feeling alone. 

Obviously, that’s not true. 

To quote Jon Bloom from Desiring God, “Jesus was a sinless person living with sinful parents, sinful siblings, sinful extended relatives and sinful neighbors. No one on earth could identify with him. No human being could put an arm around him as he sat in tears and say, ‘I know exactly what you’re going through.’ His sorrow and grief began way before Gethsemane.” When Jesus became a man, His community with the other people around Him must have been incredibly alienating. Though He was in perfect community with the Father and Spirit, He must have felt lonely too, in a sense. 

Plus, this article isn’t a biography of just one person. I’ve felt lonely before. Your parents have felt lonely before. Same with your best friend, your pastor, your seventh grade English teacher, the Apostle Paul, Taylor Swift, and every single person you follow on instagram. You, my friend, are surrounded by lonely people. 

Thankfully, for those who are in Christ, God has given us a community. If you have put your faith in Jesus, you have a place in the church body, and that community is one unlike any other. With the fellowship of the Body of Christ and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we can strengthen our faith and reliance on God, defending our soul from lies and deception. 

The important thing to remember is that loneliness is a battle that can be won. Not by your own strength, but with the power of the Holy Spirit in you. You yourself cannot win the fight, but if you give it to Christ then the weight can be lifted off your shoulders. Now it won’t be any less hard to deal with suffering in your life, but you can rest assured that this is for the glory of God, and you don’t have to deal with your emotions alone. 

And maybe loneliness isn’t something you’re particularly struggling with. If that’s the case, then I challenge you to reach out to a lonely person in your community. Is there a new person attending your Church? Do you have a friend at school who doesn’t know Christ? Is there someone in your neighborhood that has only ever heard the name of Jesus used in vain? This is your opportunity to share the love of Christ with them, let them know that they are not alone. 

Are you familiar with the New City Catechism? It’s a resource I went through with my family a while back. And the very first lesson poses this question: “What is our only hope in life and death?” What is the one thing that we can cling to when the earth gives way and the mountains are moved into the heart of the sea (Psalm 46)? Why can we be joyful despite the suffering and loneliness in the world? The response from the catechism provides the answer. “That we are not our own but belong to God.”