Loneliness & Weariness
Loneliness and the feeling of being uncared for and unwanted are the greatest poverty. Mother Teresa
Gregg’s Reflection
I always assumed I would follow my father’s footsteps into the family business. Then, I discovered the counterculture and better living through chemistry. My path shifted for good as I saw through the false idol of the American dream. I saw my friends crash and burn on drugs and realized the unsustainable life.
Met Genie, a year and a half later we got married. Two weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, we went camping. A fire burned up our apartment while we were gone, destroying all our wedding gifts. We used the money to buy camping gear, and began the road less traveled. No one understood our path. Two years of road trips where God revealed himself to me. Last trip was backpacking in Yosemite for a week We came home pregnant with Florrie, and I had to get a real job. I shaved, got a haircut, went and asked my father for a job.
As a child of the counter culture, I had to create a false persona to succeed in the family heavy equipment business, working with contractors in North Georgia. I put on a mask and left behind the rebellious younger brother who had made the prodigal journey into the counterculture. I couldn't be authentic, it was too risky. Couldn't offend the Good ol Boys who were our customers, suppliers, employees and bankers.
Upon being baptized as an adult, I began to experience role conflict between vocation and avocation. I felt the call to share my faith, but did not want to offend customers. I got no help from my pastors coping with the dilemma. Conflict between roles of husband, father, provider, son left no time for friendships or personal pursuits.
Seeking deeper friendships, I joined a Christian Men’s Retreat group, meeting for a weekend once a year. One year we studied Gail Sheehy’s Passages. In it, she describes what she called the sexual diamond. Men become completely career focused from the 20’s to the 40’s while most women took a nurturing role, rearing children (remember this was the 1980’s). Their roles diverge for two decades.
Then, in the mid-40’s men and women switch. Men begin to realize how lonely life is just focused on work and career, and yearn for friendships. At the same time, women move towards an empty nest ready to pursue their passions: work, nonprofit engagement or politics. Men are whining about being lonely and their wives say, “Get over it, get a life.”
We saw several friends die prematurely in their 40’s and early 50’s, and decided life is too short not to pursue our deeper desires. So, we sold the business in 1999, and I walked away the next year to pursue a deeper calling: bringing everything I had learned in 25 years of business into equipping next generation leaders for the Kingdom.
Now, 25 years of living out this calling had created rich friendships and meaning I never experienced in my business career. Even though we live a life of solitude, off grid in the mountains of Colorado, I am no longer lonely.
Weariness
1970's = 40 hour weeks. Learning the ropes > sales territory
1980's = 50 hour weeks. Sales territory > sales management
1990's = 60 hour weeks. Sales management > business management
1996 = I found that doing an Executive MBA while a running a business reinforces workaholic tendencies, and most don’t slow down at the end of the program, but keep the pace up into a bigger job. Again, I took the road less traveled.
2000 = sold our business, walked away at 48, while most people still have 15-20 years of looking over their shoulder for those who have an eye on the corner office that eluded them. Most realize by 45 or so that they have peaked and have to hold onto what they have for 20 years until retirement.
6 hours of sleep a night for 15 years when my natural rhythm is 8 hours
Meditation and exercise were the tools that helped me cope with long-term stress
Weariness of ignoring the wounds of leadership. ENTJ’s tough skin make it very easy to stuff emotions, very hard to process them in a healthy way. Weariness of falling into my dysfunctional pattern, straying off the path, hitting the wall time and again, damaging my health.
All these things were part of the journey through our workaholic culture, where no success kills the feelings of inadequacy so frequent in our world. Wade in and see the damage that loneliness and weariness can do to our quality of life. Blessings.
Journaling Prompts
Through my business career, I worked hard to keep boundaries in place in a culture of workaholics, so I could spend time with family and church. Have you learned to do that? How are you valuing friendships beyond work to combat loneliness? What practices (like exercise and meditation) help you deal with stress so you don’t burn out from exhaustion?
Scripture
The Lord God said: “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
Genesis 2:18
Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart and free me from my anguish. Look on my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins.
Psalm 25:15-18
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Psalm 53:3
“Truly I tell you”, Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mothers or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields—along with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life.”
Mark 10: 29-30
But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
Luke 5:16
A time is coming when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
John 16:32-33
Ancient Writings
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
St. Augustine, Confessions
Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this. Others say they would be better off in church. If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are. Your surroundings don't matter. God is with you everywhere – in the market place as well as in seclusion or in the church. If you look for nothing but God, nothing or no one can disturb you. God is not distracted by a multitude of things. Nor can we be.
Meister Eckhart
The sorrowing, the sick, the unwanted, the lonely, both young and old, rich and poor, all come to my window. No one listens, they tell me, and so I listen and tell them what they have just told me. And, I sit in silence, listening, letting them grieve.
‘Julian, you are wise,’ they say, ‘You have been gifted with understanding.’ All I did was listen. For I believe full surely that God’s spirit is in us all, giving light, wisdom, understanding, speaking words in us when we cannot speak, showing us gently what we would not see; what we are afraid to see; so that we may show pity, mercy, forgiveness to ourselves.
Julian of Norwich
You must learn to call on the Lord. Don’t sit all alone or lie on the couch, shaking your head and letting your thoughts torture you. Don’t worry about how to get out of your situation or brood about your terrible life, how miserable you feel, and what a bad person you are.
Instead, say, “Get a grip on yourself, you lazy bum!” Fall on your knees, and raise your hands and eyes toward heaven. Read a psalm. Say the Lord’s Prayer, and tearfully tell God what you need.
Martin Luther, Faith Alone: A Daily Devotional
Modern Writings
Loneliness and the feeling of being uncared for and unwanted are the greatest poverty.
Mother Teresa
Loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today. The roots of loneliness are very deep. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we could be vulnerable without being used.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 25
It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/6/21
The spiritual task is not to escape your loneliness, not to let yourself drown in it, but to find its source. This identification is not an intellectual task; it is a task of the heart. With your heart you must search for that place without fear. This is an important search because it leads you to discern something good about yourself.
The pain of your loneliness may be rooted in your deepest vocation. You might find that your loneliness is linked to your call to live completely for God. Thus your loneliness may be revealed to you as the other side of your unique gift. Once you can experience in your innermost being the truth of this, you may find your loneliness not only tolerable but even fruitful. What seemed primarily painful may then become a feeling that, though painful, opens for you the way to an even deeper knowledge of God’s love.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion 2/7/21
To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty.
The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/8/21
The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for those who can tolerate its sweet pain.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/9/21
The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.
We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.
Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations
In running from loneliness, I create all types of activity to distract me.
Mark Ritchie, Spiritual Director
Thomas Merton was an elder brother on the lonely path to God.
James Finley