Navigating together time alone…

Today is Easter Sunday.

I went to church this morning and as always the message is meaningful and strikes me in my gut. Pastor Robert Gelinas at Colorado Community Church is one of the most gifted I’ve ever had the joy to listen to. I love how the Lord uses him to speak to so many as if he’s speaking to only one.

I was going to meet a friend for lunch today, but life happens and our plans had to change. If I am being honest, and because it’s all I have, I am disappointed. In my singleness, I still struggle so much with being alone. If I could have weeks that were all just Monday through Friday 8:30 – 5:30 it would be so much easier.

It’s the together time alone I have no idea how to really deal with yet.

When your aloneness is so loud that you don’t know how to handle it, you don’t know how to package it up and effectively deal with it. So you spend the day on the couch… most of it crying. Crying for reasons you should and crying for reasons you shouldn’t. Crying because letting go is hard. Crying because being alone is hard… Crying because this is the absolute last place you ever expected to find yourself on Easter Sunday 2022.

Alone.

As a social person, an all out let’s face it extrovert, days like today are met with tight muscles and an in the gut desire to sleep until tomorrow morning. And I can’t. I mean I did most of the day… of course, now there’s the probability that sleep will escape me tonight. Leaving me in the place where I have to confront my loneliness.

You see it doesn’t matter if I am confronting it now, or later, but eventually, I have to confront it. It’s not going anywhere. And I don’t know where to start… it’s like folding and putting away laundry, you know you have to do it, but you don’t want to. Or getting your colonoscopy, or going to the dentist, or the grocery store, anything that sits on your list that you frankly just don’t want to do.

Mine is dealing with loneliness.

I feel like there are a good many books on navigating singleness, aloneness, loneliness. I wish there was a class you could take and at the end, you certificate up and are now an expert in navigating loneliness. But that couldn’t happen, not as much as I pray it would.

So I found myself on Audible.

How To Be Single

How To Be Alone

Resilient

Navigating Loneliness

The Loneliness Companion

I’m going to start at the top… and work my way down the list, keeping an open mind, and a hopeful heart that I will find a way through this mess of a lonely place I am in. Thankful for the time I have with companionship and then learning to be okay in the times when I don’t. It’s so fucking uncomfortable that I can bear it. It’s the physical pain in the heart, and the gut, the despondency you just want to disappear. I am sorry and empathetic for those who suffer this everyday. Because for me at least I can take hope and comfort that it’s only in waves, and that they don’t always last for long.

“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” James 4:8