3. Loneliness Is a Wilderness
3
Loneliness Is a Wilderness
One of the times when loneliness pours over us is when we are threatened by illness.
The phone rang late one night and a timid voice began to tell me, very hesitatingly, about a great perplexity. She was a new Christian. Things had been going wonderfully well and God had given her work to do for Him, but it was all going to grind to a halt because of illness which would probably lead to total incapacity.
“It seems very strange to me that God would allow this to happen,” said the voice.
Of course it did. God’s ways are mysterious indeed. Yet He tells us not to think them strange. Our temptations are common to man; His faithfulness is constant. I sent up an instant prayer for help in showing her what God might be up to. I had to try to start from her simple assumption, which seems logical enough, that God wants us to be happy. It is indeed true, but in a much deeper way than we think. “Happiness,” as defined by the world, means exemption from suffering. As Peter Kreeft tells us in his masterful book, Making Sense Out of Suffering, ancient man was preoccupied with how to be good while modern man is preoccupied with how to be happy. To the ancient, goodness leads to happiness. To the modern, goodness leads to anything but. “Everything I enjoy is immoral, illegal, or fattening” is the saying.
I didn’t weigh in with all of this to the troubled girl on the phone, but I did try to help her see that as a Christian she might look at things from a different angle. She needed to start from the Love of God and understand that that love, revealed on the Cross, does not exclude but must always include suffering.
“But what good will I be flat on my back?” came the plaintive question. So we had to talk about God’s idea of “good”—very different from mere utilitarianism. He wanted her to trust and obey (“for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus,” as the old gospel song says). The only way she could learn trust and obedience was to have things happen which she could not understand. That is where faith begins—in the wilderness, when you are alone and afraid, when things don’t make sense. She must hang on to the message of the Cross: God loves you. He loved you enough to die for you. Will you trust Him?
I gave her St. Peter’s word about the trial of faith being a more precious thing than gold—and even gold has to go through fire to be purified. Fire is hot. Fire causes pain. But a pure faith would be worth far more to God than all the service she had hoped to render if poor health had not interrupted her plans.
There was a pause. Then I heard the timid little voice say, “Oh.” I’m sure she felt she was about to enter a waste, howling wilderness and she was afraid. I prayed that God would go with her every step of the way and let her know that everything was under control.
Suffering is a wilderness experience. We feel very much alone and helpless, cut off from others who cannot know how we suffer. We long for someone to come to our aid, be “company” for us, get us out of this.
Someone will. Some One will certainly come to our aid. He will be company for us if we’ll let Him. But get us out of it? Not necessarily. It is one of the terms of being human (which means that although we cannot do anything about it, there is something very important that we can do with it—but more of that later). Jesus Himself, being a man subject to all of a man’s temptations, was not excused from the wilderness experience.
It was immediately after His baptism, when it would seem He was all ready to begin His public ministry. Instead of to Jerusalem where He would be able to “reach” crowds, the Spirit of God led Him straight to a place where there was nobody—a wilderness—for the express purpose of being put to the test. The test came in the form of an encounter with Satan. And so it does with us. When we are hungry, cut off from help, and alone, the enemy comes to meet us. He makes what’s right seem unattractive and what’s wrong seem very attractive. He offered Jesus everything the world counts essential to happiness: the satisfaction of physical desire, immunity from danger, and “all the kingdoms of the world in their glory” (Matt. 4:8 NEB), which I take to mean everything else the world has to offer.
Jesus was tempted. The price of Satan’s offers, on the face of it, was cheap—work a couple of small miracles, do obeisance to him. The price of obedience to the Father, on the other hand, was high. It would cost Him everything. Here was the real test of Jesus’ trust, of His love for God, the purity of His purpose, the irrevocability of His commitment. He categorically refused every offer, meeting the test with the written Word:
It is written.
It is written.
It is written.
Satan knew he was vanquished and left.
I remember waking up very early one morning in a tiny reed-and-leaf shelter on the banks of the Curary River. My three-year-old and I had spent the night there with some Indians on our way home to a clearing about a day’s journey beyond. Rain was sweeping over the river and the sandy beach in great waving sheets, and with the rain a huge loneliness seemed about to drown me. I felt that I could not face a day like that in a dugout canoe, nor did I have the least desire to get back to that clearing. Civilization was what I wanted at that moment, not adventure, but I had no choice. God met me there that morning and strengthened me with an It is written, reminding me of His promises, I will never leave you nor forsake you. I am with you always (Heb. 13:5 NEB; Matt. 28:20 KJV).
In the wilderness of loneliness we are terribly vulnerable. What we want is OUT, and sometimes there appear to be some easy ways to get there. Will we take Satan up on his offers, satisfy our desires in ways never designed by God, seek security outside of His holy will? If we do, we may find a measure of happiness, but not the lasting joy our heavenly Father wants us to have. We will “gain the world,” but we’ll lose our souls. Jesus knew that His joy lay in only one direction: the will of the Father. And so does ours.
Pain, as C. S. Lewis said, is God’s megaphone (“He whispers to us in our joys, speaks to us in our conscience, and shouts to us in our pain”). The pain of loneliness is one way in which He wants to get our attention.
We may be earnestly desiring to be obedient and holy. But we may be missing the fact that it is here, where we happen to be at this moment and not in another place or another time, that we may learn to love Him—here where it seems He is not at work, where His will seems obscure or frightening, where He is not doing what we expected Him to do, where He is most absent. Here and nowhere else is the appointed place. If faith does not go to work here, it will not go to work at all.
Is the response of faith really different from the response of the rest of the world? I want to tell you a story which shows that it is as different as night and day. It is the story of a man who was acutely lonely. His loneliness was the same stuff everybody suffers in one form or another. What this man did with it is something else.