Would you not agree that loneliness can threaten the personality much as gangrene can threaten the body?
In a response to my weekly e-mails, an H.I. alumna recommended that I send How to Win Over Loneliness in weekly installments. So, by special request, I will do so, beginning with this longer-than-usual first section.
Alone Together
It may surprise you to read that I’ve known a lot of loneliness in my life.
In my youth, loneliness sprang from being weak and timid. I didn't walk until I was over two, and didn’t talk until nearly three. When I did talk, I was so shy that I remember my father threatening to punish me if I didn’t come out and speak to guests in our home. Some of that shyness has hung on. Even now, if I see a group of friends standing in a hotel lobby — friends I love and respect — I find it easier to slip by unnoticed than go and talk to them.
As a child, timidity cut me off from other people. I was embarrassed by displays of emotion. As a six-year-old, when I walked into the living room to find my parents hugging each other I mumbled, “Oh, excuse me!” and retired in a hurry! If I was the one being hugged, my discomfort was worse still — in fact, my parents became so conscious of this that when it came to physical expressions of love, like kissing and embracing, they treated me with greater caution than they did my brothers, Ted and Tom.
Unaware that I was the cause of the problem, I concluded that since I received the fewest hugs I was the least-loved member of the family and must therefore have been adopted. At eight, I recall, I was spending long, lonely hours comforting myself with the thought that, if I wasn't loved, I sure was fortunate to have such a good home. Adopted I might be, but at least I wasn't out on the street.
And then, in 1932, I got some good news. My teacher in the third grade explained to us that when we were born a birth certificate was made out, giving all the relevant details about our parents, our weight, gender, name, and the time and place of birth. I was overjoyed, and rushed home to confront my mother. But my mother seemed strangely evasive.
“John Edmund,” she said, “it’s interesting you should ask about that because I have been trying to get your birth certificate. You see, the doctor who delivered you has died, and there were some irregularities in the record-keeping. But I have been working for some time on getting the certificate.”
Hope crumbled. “She’s hiding something from me,” I thought. “Now I know I’m adopted.”
I hardly listened to her as she described to me the circumstances of my birth, in the Susan Speed Davis Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, on February 27, 1924. I wasn’t impressed that she knew the doctor’s name. I felt utterly crushed, and I went on feeling that way until, several weeks later and out of the blue, my mother remarked, “Oh, John Edmund, your birth certificate came in the mail today.” I grasped that piece of paper as though it were a stay of execution. And the next time I looked in the mirror, I noticed for the first time the similarities between myself and my parents.
The Lonely Schoolboy
But that didn’t solve the loneliness problem. At the age of 13, I was sent on a generous scholarship to Stony Brook School for Boys. Only pride prevented me from letting on how frightened I was. Many of the students came from far richer homes than mine. (The Susan Speed Davis Hospital, where I had been born, was run by the Salvation Army for the benefit of the poor.) They had fine clothes. Some even drove automobiles. I hoped my parents were going to stay through the first lunch hour, but while sitting in the Introductory Latin class, I heard the old 1930 Chevrolet grinding away down the drive in second gear.
I don’t think I’d ever been lonelier. My total cash flow was four dollars, and it had to last until Christmas. There was no possibility of buying sports gear, taking bus trips into neighboring towns, or getting tickets for athletic events. When Thanksgiving came around, I was one of the handful of students anchored at school because there was no money for the trip home.
The fact that my roommate was the son of a missionary gave me no consolation. He was five-feet-six and I was four-feet-eleven. I realize now that he was a good boy with high ideals and deep convictions, but at the time his nagging got on my nerves, and during one study time, when he got on to me about something, I ended up landing an uppercut on his jaw. That was the only way I could reach him!
I immediately felt ashamed and humiliated — most of all because I had knocked the gold cap off one of his front teeth. Of course, I offered to pay for the repair. As the son of a minister who worked sometimes at starvation wages, I was sensitive to the economic limitations of missionaries. The boy’s parents graciously agreed to my offer, and I set to work to raise the money. Fortunately I had just begun a little sideline business selling neckties. I still remember the slogan:
BE WISE
ECONOMIZE
BUY A TIE
FROM HAGGAI!
Those early years at the school were trying in many ways. I was physically weak. I had a high, grating voice. I was hopelessly shy. I bore the unmistakable imprint of my father’s Syrian extraction. And on top of everything else I was known as a preacher’s kid. To a boy my age, that spelled one word: loneliness.
One day, the school got a visit from a famous world missionary statesman, Dr. John R. Mott. The address which this 70-year-old man delivered in the chapel, on “The Temptations of Youth,” was utterly humorless. But it held every student on the edge of his seat. The whole school was spellbound. When the dean announced afterward that Dr. Mott had agreed to give counseling in 15-minute slots to as many boys as his schedule permitted him to see, there was a rush to get into the line. I would have given a lot for 15 minutes with Dr. Mott, but being small and slow I came up at the end of the line and never got to see him.
My loneliness deepened.
At last, I decided that the only way to make myself more acceptable to my peers was to get in shape physically. I took up wrestling. It didn’t go well at first. I was light, and an AAU champion in the 145-pound division managed to break my collarbone while teaching me a new hold. That put me out of commission for several weeks. But I persevered, and by the age of 15, I was doing bodybuilding, weight-lifting, and acrobatic gymnastics.
These helped me a lot. The turning point, though, came in my senior year, when I got laid up in bed for several weeks following an automobile accident. My mother gave me a book that changed the course of my life. The writer urged his readers to seek out people of outstanding achievement, to make friends with them, to learn from them and be inspired by them. The thought came to me that I had been trying to develop in a vacuum. So wrapped up had I become in my own sense of inferiority that I had neglected to take the initiative in making friends. I determined to take the writer’s advice to heart, and since that time I have always made it a habit to aggressively develop friendships.
My Deepest Loneliness
Did that put an end to loneliness? Well, not really. One of my young colleagues — in his thirties and the father of three precious children — said to me recently, “John, don’t you get terribly lonesome on your travels? When I’m away from my family for two hours, I get so lonely I can hardly stand it.”
My first response was, “Michael, the Lord has blessed me with so much hay on my fork, so much work to get done, so many deadlines to meet, that I don’t have time to think about it.”
But later, as I pondered his question, I had to confess that there have been times when I felt terribly lonely. My salvation lies in the fact that (as I said to Michael) I am usually immersed in work and service. Nonetheless, if I am honest I cannot deny that even as a Christian, and even after adopting various stratagems against it (such as making friends), I have still been afflicted with the experience of loneliness. It has been there in my constant traveling and my separation from the ones I love. Most of all it has hit me in the death of my son, Johnny, an invalid for 24 years, whose story I have told in another book.
Many times when I was traveling on the other side of the world, I would think about those awful seizures he had. I don’t know how often we had to grab him up, bundle him into a car, and race him to the hospital to get emergency medication. The horror of that experience used to play like a movie on the screen of my mind. Every time it happened a quiet terror plagued me: “What will Chris do if this happens while I’m gone?”
In fact, Chris, my wife, always coped admirably. But somehow that never relieved my own sense of pressure and loneliness. Only God knows the sickness I felt in the pit of my stomach when I had to leave the house on yet another trip. If I were prone to ulcers, my stomach would be full of them by now.
For 24 years we lived like that. I hated to be away from home. I even felt guilty that I wasn't doing for Johnny what I felt needed to be done. But I knew it would neither glorify God nor help Johnny and Chris if I abandoned my spiritual responsibilities. They freed me up to serve God, and I believe that God ministered to them in ways they may not even have realized.
My loneliness with Johnny entered a whole new phase when the Lord took him home, in 1975. Sooner or later everyone has to deal with the loneliness of bereavement. Many would say that it is the deepest kind of loneliness. I must admit I miss Johnny intensely. He was our only child, and although he needed constant attention and never managed to speak more than two intelligible words, I could not have asked for a more loving or supportive son. I found such great release in sharing with him the joys and difficulties of my ministry. I knew I could rely on him to pray for me. Not a day passes now when I do not think of him, or wish I could still share my dreams and watch his eyes light up in response to a new idea. But I can’t. He’s gone. And much of what I have learned about winning over loneliness I have learned by facing this, my own deepest loneliness.
Loneliness and You
So, I’ve been lonely. And you’ve been lonely, too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every human being has experienced loneliness at some time. And just as we all lead different lives, so our encounters with loneliness vary. It arises through crises, as well as through the ordinary course of daily life. No two people are lonely in quite the same way or for quite the same reason, though there are common themes in loneliness that we will be looking at.
The point I want to make here is that loneliness simply as an experience — an unpleasant feeling we don’t like — should be classified as a pain. Like every other pain, it came into the world through the fall of man. Like every other pain, it hurts us. We are not necessarily sinning against God or letting Him down if we seek relief in tears; if my background had permitted me to cry, I know that crying would sometimes have brought comfort in loneliness. Loneliness is a pain that we should not have to endure in a perfect world, and, in fact, we shall not endure it in the world to come. Most important of all, it is a pain we can conquer by using the methods which God directed me to employ in confronting loneliness, and which I am going to pass on to you in the weeks ahead.
But there is something else about loneliness that you need to know. Loneliness, per se, is not a sin. But it is a complex phenomenon, often embracing a wide range of other experiences, such as boredom, isolation, frustration, emptiness, and low self-image.
And it is dangerous — a destructive force that can easily bind the sufferer into a state of sin before he or she actually realizes it. When this happens, and loneliness is permitted to persist, to run wild and unchecked, it will destroy the lonely person and greatly harm those who are close by. For that reason, it is vital to confront loneliness; it is a progressive condition that can distort and undermine our personality, and it must be tackled promptly.
[To be continued . . .]
Copyright © 2011 John Edmund Haggai
This is
Part 1 in a series from
my book,
How to Win Over Loneliness.
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