“You can do this. You have a good reason to be here,” I assured my 8-year-old self as I walked over to our neighbor’s house. My family was new in town, and my brother Nick, who has never had any social anxiety, had rapidly made friends with the kids next door. Nervous, I practiced looking cool, even mildly unimpressed. If they caught a whiff of my loneliness, there was no way I’d become part of the crew.
You may have similar memories of feeling lonely as a kid. The odd thing about loneliness is it doesn’t always go away as an adult. In fact, it’s a serious problem worldwide. In 2023, the former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that America is facing a loneliness epidemic.¹ The UK and Japan have both created government positions, nicknamed “Ministers of Loneliness,” to address the issue.²
Scripture gives us a solution to loneliness, but it’s not merely to look for friends. In John 15:15, Jesus said to His disciples, “I have called you friends.” Why? “For everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you…I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit” (NIV). The disciples are friends because they share Jesus’ mission and purpose.
The odd thing about loneliness is it doesn’t always go away as an adult. In fact, it’s a serious problem worldwide.
C.S. Lewis says every friendship is built this way: on a common purpose outside the friendship itself. Without it, friendship is impossible. This is why “people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends…friendship must be about something.”³
If purpose is a necessary ingredient of friendship, then pursuing your purpose will likely attract friendship. Perhaps that’s why God gives humanity an active role in spreading the gospel: we not only share the gospel, but we also find the most fulfilling connections through the most glorious purpose.
If you’re struggling with loneliness, try pursuing your gospel purpose: join an outreach activity or a small group, teach Sabbath school, lead out in your church service, become a greeter—the ideas are endless. You might find, like I did when I talked with the girls next door about gymnastics, that you have a whole new crew on your doorstep.
- Elizabeth M. Ross, “What Is Causing Our Epidemic of Loneliness and How Can We Fix It?” Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 2024, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/10/what-causing-our-epidemic-loneliness-and-how-can-we-fix-it.
- Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, “Joint Message from the UK and Japanese Loneliness Ministers,” GOV.UK, June 17, 2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-message-from-the-uk-and-japanese-loneliness-ministers.
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), 98, https://www.allsaintswandsworth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/the-four-loves.pdf.
Anneliese Stock
Allie is a 2012 ARISE graduate and on-staff writer and communications assistant for Light Bearers. She is fascinated by the intersection of faith and the creative process and enjoys poetry. When she’s not watching a good movie with her friends, she enjoys narrating life with mediocre accents.
