I am not a person who fears being alone or who is given to loneliness. In the days before I was married I talked to many people who referenced loneliness as a reason to start a family by finding a partner. I rejected this whole concept. There were a lot of other forces driving my life, but I was determined that loneliness would not be one of them. Then came the year 2007. I had just lived overseas for a year and was coming back. I felt alone. I had reverse culture shock. I felt lost and unhappy. I also needed work that was meaningful. After a season, I secured a job as a street advocate, taking causes like sponsoring children in developing countries to the street corners and trying to get people to sign up. I am not a salesman, and am terrible at convincing people of things. I spent my first and only day of this work on a street corner in Seattle talking to strangers and trying to get them to sign up. I was with a team but it was clear to me after a few hours that I was not natural at this, and the manager did not look happy with me. I didn’t realize that if I didn’t make a sale, I would be let go. At one point, my manager had me walk to a different street corner far from the team. It was not good. Standing on that corner, feeling invisible and profoundly disappointed, I remember seeing my sad face in the reflection of a department store window and feeling a pang of loneliness like a steel spike, shoot through my whole body. The last part of the day was being told I didn’t have what it takes and angrily storming out, and receiving a sum of $64 for the day.
Several months went by and I had secured a job as a youth pastor for college and young adults. I had worked with high school students and had a degree in religion, but this was a new experience to be one of “the guys” on Sunday morning. Our church was seen as a teaching and preaching church, so my Sunday group consisted of messages and discussion around those messages. Honestly looking back, this was a waste of my times and everyone else's. I should have realized this when after about two months, I found myself hoping that no one would show up on Sunday morning. This actually happened once and my relief was quickly stolen by the volunteer staff expressing discontent. Only now in reflecting do I remember one of the first “Behind the pulpit” lessons I taught when as I stood there speaking, that same steel spike of loneliness shot through me.
From pulpits to street corners, I hadn’t connected these two events, but these two singular experiences are how I know loneliness. They take place in areas surrounded by people, in which I have a message that I want others to hear. There is yearning and longing, and the fear of never being fulfilled. This is how I conceive a lonely place. I felt that same spike for the first time last week as I presented in peer group for the first time. I wasn’t presenting anything noteworthy, and the feedback I got was benign, until we cut right into the heart of who I was. It is a lonely place you enter into when you present who you are for critique. Perhaps that was the taste I got on that street corner or in that beige Sunday school room. But stepping into that CPE arena was drinking from the source, the path of deeper inter-connectedness is the path of truly knowing loneliness
