Have you ever thought about the difference between being alone and loneliness? There’s a huge difference between being alone and loneliness. Alone is a population matter. You just happen to be by yourself but you’re with it cause you’re okay with yourself. Sometimes, it’s work obligations that keep you alone, maybe late hours of the day, or at office, or at home. Nowadays, we’re working from home. Our whole nation is on lockdown. Being alone is okay because you’re focusing on something, or, as I was teaching in a sermon, that isolation is good for you because you spend time with God or you’re able to focus on aspects of yourself and fix yourself, and think about the way you think about stuff.
But loneliness is where it gets to hurt or it gets dangerous. Loneliness is that, even with people around us, we’re still lonely. That means we really don’t have someone who is sharing the purpose of our life. We don’t have someone who is sharing a witness to our life. We feel that other people add value to our life, which they do, but then, since they’re not around or not the people we want around, we then become lonely. It’s negative because we connect it to a sense of not being loved, that I’m lonely because I don’t have people who love me, in my life, or it could be phobias, it could be panic.
There could be other emotional aspects of it, because a lot of the times, primarily, it is emotional.
If you are at peace with yourself, then you would be in the alone category where, your mind is busy, your heart is at peace with yourself, and you love being alone or you need that time to be alone, or you know what to do with yourself when you’re alone. And you can wait for personable support, from people support, you can wait for that. You don’t need social interaction constantly. That’s a good way of being alone. That’s a good place to be in.
But when you struggle with yourself, your feelings, you’re not at peace with yourself, or you constantly need someone to talk to you so that your thoughts don’t overpower your feelings. Then you need to take some positive steps in that direction to kind of fix that. The ways you can do it is by checking what are the things you think about, what are you watching. You know, a lot of the times, we’re watching stuff that kind of makes our fears even worse, they make our panics even worse. Sometimes, we’re watching dark stuff, devious stuff, stressful stuff, and we kind of enter into that reality of television or books or whatever, and we begin to live out the feelings and the hurts and the pains and the fears of people, where it’s not even our fears but we’re suffering for them. So, sometimes, it needs to be more on the lighter note. There are a lot of standup comedians coming up today with fun stuff. There’s going for walks, there’s bright, as against dark, bright, just go out in the day, meet with people. Think about how meeting other people’s needs could change the way you think.
Loneliness, often times, is because I’m not happy about something. There’s a very mild anger or mild disappointment with myself or with somebody or the other, and that’s why I feel I’m lonely. Change that. Text somebody. Talk to somebody. And don’t ask them to ask you, you ask them how they’re doing. Call and facetime people. You engage. If you need people, be the people they need. And don’t trust your thoughts and your feelings as the gospel truth for everything. Don’t trust them as your reality. Exit that reality and enter into somebody else’s reality, and make your life about somebody else, and you won’t feel loneliness, you will not struggle with loneliness. Am I saying you’ll never struggle with loneliness? No, I’m just saying when it comes, you’ll know what to do with it.
Lonely people are self-centered people. It is a moral issue. It is an emotional issue. And it is moral and emotional because you are meant to be at peace with yourself. And if you can be someone who’s there for others, if you can be thinking about what others need, if you can be thinking about how productive you can be for others, then when you find yourself alone, you’ll find that you’re not lonely. How about that, huh? Think about it. You don’t have to take everything I’m saying, but think about it.
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