Should Single Christians Be Lonely?

Countless single Christians struggle with loneliness. Should Christians expect this or is this something that can be ended for those who truly walk in intimacy with Jesus? To put it another way, is loneliness natural because we were built to desire an intimate relationship with the opposite sex or is it something remedied through deep intimacy with Jesus?

I do not pose this as an academic question. As a guy who did not get married until he was 35 I was often left quite confused by this dilemma. If Jesus could fill my void – why didn’t he? How much more spiritual discipline (prayer, bible reading, service, etc.) did I need to reach the end of loneliness? In fact, nothing seemed to ultimately answer the reoccuring struggle. I never did resolve the experience of loneliness as a single. Quite the opposite, I found life as a single Christian was difficult, messy and complex. I could spend the next few pages elaborating on that struggle. It was real. It was painful. It made me question God’s love and justice. Yet though that struggle was all of these things I did find a way to exist without abandoning hope in the midst of the constantly shifting struggle. For while the Bible did not attempt to solve the mysterious nature of this pain, it did begin to give clues to what lies behind the complexity of my experience. In fact, the more I began to understand the Bible’s message the more the complexity of my experience of being single was validated.

There are a number of ways the Bible speaks to the complexity of our loneliness. In this entry, I want to look at one in particular; how the narrative structure of the Bible gives us a framework for understanding why loneliness as a single is complex, messy and reoccuring.

Life in Chapter 3

The Bible can be seen as having four chapters. (This is a very reduced understanding of the “big picture” but it will work for our purposes.) Each one of these chapters speaks to a facet of life that a single Christian experiences:

Chapter 1 - God creates man “male and female” – people created as engendered (sexual) beings

Chapter 2 - Mankind’s fall – loneliness and alienation implicit within relationships

Chapter 3 - Jesus redeems –God inaugurates his project of restoring brokenness through Jesus

Chapter 4 – Final restoration – Jesus completely renews his broken world “wiping every tear”

This vantage point is helpful in a couple of ways: First, sometimes my perspective is skewed and despair ensues. When I was single I would sometimes see my singleness only within the framework of my own lifespan. If I simply took a birth to death view growing older meant a diminishing hope of my sexuality ever being actualized. (Yikes! Here comes "The 40-year old virgin"!) The first thing recognizing the big picture does is give me a basic framework for viewing the issues of my life within a larger reality. Secondly, just as it was toxic to see life simply in terms of my own birth to death reality, it was toxic to see my singleness from only the vantage point of one of the chapters of God’s work in history. My status of being single within God’s story meant there were simultaneously truths that I must affirm and allow to be in tension. Here are some of them:

Creation: I am created, hard wired, built for intimacy. It is not good for me to be alone. There is a deep-seated sense that I was meant to know and be known as an engendered (sexual) being.

Fall: I neither exist nor enter into potential relationships as a neutral being. My ability to be in intimate relationships is affected by a destructive power that hides me from others and myself.

Redemption: God has begun to work to deal with my brokenness and the social manifestations of sin which brings hiddeness and destructive patters in relationships. God has begun to meet me at the deepest level of my being, from which my engendered nature originates.

Final Restoration: God will one day work in such a way as to sufficiently address my flourishing as an engendered being. How he will do this is a mystery.

True Maturity

Often well meaning friends (some of them married – God bless them) would pray for Jesus to fill the void I felt in my singleness. And sometimes it seemed to work. I would wake up and many days being single was fine. The world inside seemed to be as it should be. Then something (a full moon; seeing two lovers hand in hand; a good dinner alone, etc. etc.) would trigger my longing for companionship. Where was Jesus now? I began to see that the problem with this prayer was it misunderstood what maturity looked like as a single Christian. To be mature as a Christian is to recognize the truth of these chapters and live consistent within the chapter God places us. What was misguided about praying that Jesus could simply “fill my void” was asking for God to do something that God says does not occur until chapter 4 of the story. This prayer asked that my createdness and falleness be over-ruled by my redemption. [Theologians call this “over realized eschatology”. The Corinthian church was rebuked in great detail by the apostle Paul for this same issue.] Their prayer assumed things that are part of the future should be experienced in the here and now. The scripture is clear. We have not arrived at chapter 4. Jesus is not yet wiping ever tear. Right now he is calling people to follow him. Chapter 3 is about a path that involves a strange mixture of suffering and joy, of hardship and hope (2 Cor. 4:8-18; Phil. 3:10-11). We are being “baptized into his death” that we might enter into “new life” (Rom. 6). This is not to say that we can't experience the intimacy of Jesus as real and healing but these epiphanies are not the staple but foretastes meant to engender hope to persevere. They are the down payment by God to show good faith of a future renewal (Rom 8:23).

The issue that single Christians (in fact all Christians) must deal with is the genuine struggle and difficulty that is part of the package of following Jesus. Yes, there are things to relieve the loneliness a Christian experiences (e.g. healthy friendships) and things we can do that aggravate and accelerate that loneliness (e.g. living alone). But regardless, to be single is to experience in a concrete way the reality of the alienation which was not intended in God’s original good world. To be alone regarding our engendered selves is to face head on the fact that God has yet to complete his project of renewal. The only way to move is forward in the messiness and complexity in ultimate hope that one day Jesus will bring the end of loneliness at a level beyond our comprehension. This is not a one-time step but the difficult work of all of those who in faith follow Jesus in spite of trying circumstances. May we continue to journey forward by the same grace that enabled Jesus to "suffer all things".

They placed their hope in the resurrection to a better life… – Hebrews 11:36


Next: Why did God ever place these desires in me in the first place if he knew that they could never be met?