Living to Win Over Loneliness

Tom Shrader addresses the universal experience of loneliness, noting how it increases with age as we lose friends and face physical limitations. Drawing from Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, he explains God's three-part solution: meaningful friendships with those who share our faith, the partnership of marriage as designed by God, and most importantly, a relationship with Christ who can meet our deepest longings that no human relationship can fulfill.

“That loneliness that you feel is real and genuine and in the ultimate sense will not be met with a person, place, or thing other than Jesus.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Living to Win (2014)

Recorded: 2014

Duration: 39 min

Themes: loneliness, friendship, marriage, aging, relationships, community, purpose, belonging, feeling isolated, losing friends, aging adult, widowed, empty nester, struggling with purpose, seeking community, new to church

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, Genesis 2:18, Genesis 2:20-24, Ephesians 5, John 14, Psalm 139, Psalm 33, Psalm 70, Psalm 115

Theological Themes: ecclesiology, church community, biblical friendship, marriage covenant, relationship with christ, spiritual fellowship, divine companionship, body of christ

Full Transcript

We are in week six of an eight-week series called Living to Win. What we did in this is identify issues that all of us inevitably deal with. Today may be one of those, just based on some of the quotes we have.

We've done this now, Priority Living, going into our 24th year in January, which is amazing. As I've aged, and we've aged, so have you. As I get older, I'm not sure that loneliness doesn't creep in more into our life. We begin to lose a spouse or our friends. I mean, I can't be the only one who checks the obits every day to see if my classmates are in it. You start to have some of the physical issues that begin to limit the activities you used to participate in. Therefore, the circle of friends gets smaller. This loneliness thing can creep in pretty quickly.

The Universal Reality of Loneliness

Thomas Wolfe wrote, and the quote is on your outline: "Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomena, particularly to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." He makes me look like Zig Ziglar. Here's what he's saying: this is just part of life.

I watch my grandkids, and I watch them now start to grow up, and I can watch them navigate. Here are the guys, the cool guys, the guys you want to spend time with. These are the ones that you want to accept you. They'll be talking about my friend Tyler, my friend so-and-so. "I don't really know him. Well, I've never really talked to him." But that need to be part of or feel part of something.

If I can hit the pause button there and interject, this is a great role that the church can play in your life. God is concerned about you and provides a solution to loneliness. Three of them. One is friendships, and that's for everybody. Two, not necessarily for everybody, is marriage. Three is to have a relationship in some sort of sense—not to minimize it—but a friendship with Christ.

Even Icons Experience Loneliness

I want to come back to that point about loneliness. There's a guy that's on C-SPAN a lot, Richard Norton Smith. He's a historian. He is the guy who started or at least updated and really created an incredible library in West Branch, Iowa, the Herbert Hoover Library. Then he did Reagan's library. Then he did Ford's. Brian Lamb loves this guy. They're on there all the time, and he's a very engaging guy.

He's written a book on George Washington. So I bought this book on George Washington, biography. I thought, this would be great, because maybe he'll write like McCullough. It'll be engaging. The book was awful. So I called my brother, and we talk a lot, and he's a book guy. I said, "What are you reading?" He said, "I just bought this book on George Washington because I saw Richard Norton Smith on C-SPAN, and I thought this would be great." He said, "Tom, this is terrible." It was terrible. I mean, I saw it on my shelf the other day, and I thought, I ought to pick it up. Maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind, but I thought, no, Dan didn't like it either.

In the course of the interview to promo the book, Brian Lamb said, "What would surprise us about George Washington?" Smith said, "Well, I think you'd be surprised how prideful he was, how ambitious he was, how driven he was, how rich he was. But what might surprise you most is how lonely he was." Whether it was through his personality—you talk about icon, I mean, this guy walks into the room, he's a head taller than everybody else, and he's George Washington. He loved to dance, seemed to be a little flirtatious, but according to Smith, very lonely.

My point is, though you may feel like it, you aren't the only one.

Loneliness in Our Modern Age

To add one more twist to this as we get into the topic, Paul Little writes this: "One of the prominent symptoms of our times," so he's commenting on the culture we're in, "is loneliness. Isn't it ironic that in an age of the greatest population explosion the world has ever known, more people are desperately lonely than ever before? Even the high rise apartments in our cities are monuments to loneliness. There is aching loneliness behind those doors for many people. I know of those, both in the city and the suburbs, who go to the malls, shopping malls, simply for an opportunity to talk to somebody in a store. At least the checker will speak to them." He finishes, "Loneliness is one of the desperate problems of our age."

I love to go to the mall. I love to go to Fashion Square, not an outdoor mall guy. I love Fashion Square. I love to get a beverage and sit up on the second floor and look down at the food court and watch people and make up my own story. "That can't be his wife." I love it. "Look at those two. Look at them fight. Look at those sisters. Look at the way they eat. Look at how they eat. Look at that. She's going to take her food." I love to sit there and watch it. It's a social place. That used to be the town square.

The Social Design of Community

In the state of Iowa, if you can get in your mind a visual of the state of Iowa, it size-wise is small, a fraction of Arizona. But in Iowa, and this is an amazing number, there are 99 counties. If you think of the state, they're almost square. The whole idea in 1846 was that you could go anywhere in the county to the county seat, transact business, and return the same day. This system might be a little antiquated.

If you drive through, as we did this summer, if you just drive and get off Interstate 80 at Newton and drive down through Knoxville and you get to Sheraton, and then you have a string as you go across, and you have Sheraton and Albia and Oskaloosa and Ottumwa—take Ottumwa out of the mix. If you go to these other towns, they're towns of about 5,000 people. In the middle, literally in the middle, is a town square. In the middle of that square is City Hall.

There's a barber shop, a bar, and in those days, a pool hall, and a Woolworth's or a Ben Franklin's or a Sears. They were all there, and people would congregate. I remember going, and the highlight of going to see my grandpa was to say, "Let's go up to the town square." He'd go into the bar, and we'd get a Pepsi, and you'd watch him and literally the old guys playing checkers. Those gathering places are gone and replaced by the mall, the place to gather, and now we face loneliness.

God's Plan for Friendship

Here's God's plan for dealing with your loneliness and mine. First of all, friendship. Ecclesiastes 4:9—I'll read it, and we'll pull four principles out of it that I think are evident:

"Two are better than one because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up. Also, if two lie down together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken."

Increased Output Through Partnership

Number one, there's increased output. Two are better than one. They have a good return. When I was at the end of my time at Coldwell Banker, you could see it coming. It was a wonderful industry and the perfect job for me personally. But it was pretty individualistic, and that was one of the hard things about putting a department together.

You're going to have an office broker meeting, and it's very hard to build camaraderie because in one sense, though we're all wearing Coldwell Banker blue, we're still our own guy. It's hard to say, "Come in here and share information," while I'm sharing it with you knowing you're going to use it to make a deal that I don't make. The old slogan used to be, at least in my mind, "The next best thing to making a deal is seeing someone else lose one." This is dog eat dog.

But there was a movement coming, and you could see it. We're going to have teams now—two or three of us on a team. Trust me, the Bible wasn't driving this, but the verse would have been, "Two are better than one. They have a good return for their work." You go on vacation, I cover your calls. We go into a call together, and I'm going to pick up things and address them that you aren't. The idea of friendship is it increases my output too.

Security in Relationship

It gives me a sense of security. If one falls down, the other can help him up. All of a sudden, I'm not going it alone. I need people around me.

I was talking to a guy whose wife has Alzheimer's, so their world is shrinking. He's an older guy, and I've become this emotional wreck on this stuff—I'm back on this medicine that has me crying at a Safeway opening. So he's telling me this story, and I'm starting to tear up. I said, "I'll bet that's really hard to watch." He said, "Here's the hardest thing: one by one, our friends are deserting us."

I know what you're saying. I know you're going, "Oh." But I'm telling you, I'll bet you're doing it too, because it's hard to watch. It's hard to be part of. I don't know what to say. I don't feel like it's any contribution. It's hard for me to go. But it doesn't matter—it's this idea of now there's this friend, this two of them.

I watched an interview with Monica Lewinsky, and I've always found her fascinating. Not sexually, but I find her fascinating because if her boss would have been at your business place, he'd have been fired, but we'd build a library for him. She was talking about going through this ordeal where she's become a punchline for everybody. She was tearing up and said, "I don't know if I could have made it through this without my family and a few friends." Life's going to throw that stuff at you, and you have that other person.

Warmth and Strength in Unity

There's warmth and fellowship. "If two lie down, they keep warm." This is not some sort of sexual thing. These are guys who were shepherds out there in the cold, and they're saying there's a security to this. There's a fellowship in the true sense of the word of sharing.

And there is strength in unity. It's the closing line of that passage: "A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." I take a cord, I might snap it. I might take two and put them together—I snap it, it takes a little more. But once I get to three, it's a pretty tough pull. God meant for you to have these friends. You desperately need them around you.

What to Look for in Friendship

Now I'm going to give you four things to look for in friendship.

Number one, they ought to share your faith. That might seem weird to you, but friendship, as I think about it, becomes sharing intimacies of life. Just yesterday, we were having a staff meeting talking about what we're seeing. This guy was talking about a lady in one of the small groups who was meeting with his wife. She said, "My husband is"—and then she started—"He's dumb. He's inconsiderate." I wanted to add right there, "He's a man." She's listing these things about what he is, and she said, "I want out of this."

The gal listened to her and said, "I bet," and then said, "The only thing worse than the way you described him is you getting out of it. We're followers of Christ," and so on. You get with just somebody from down the street who doesn't share those values, and she's going—

to say, he's a bum. Get rid of him. You're going to come with some sort of crisis at work, some sort of ethical dilemma. If that person doesn't share not just your values, but your faith driven by Christ, you're liable to get a different opinion.

Here's the second thing about a friend. They should be the same gender. I'm a little nervous when a guy 40 tells me his best friend is his administrative assistant, this 23-year-old girl. And here's why. Because here's what friendship does. Now I start to share with you the thoughts I'm having, the struggles I'm having. There is a connectedness that takes place at this level. And that's why you hear all along, "I never planned it. It just sort of happened." Well, it just sort of happened because you had all these elements together, and you put a guy and a gal together, and you start sharing this intimacy. And again, I don't mean anything sexual. I'm just talking about the intimacies of life, the struggles of life. Something happens.

Here's the third thing. There has to be a level of trust. I call it the New York Times test. I have to assume that whatever I say to you, I'm going to read tomorrow in the New York Times. How's it going to read? I'll confess. That's been my biggest, I think one of them, I'd say biggest struggle in deep friendships—is I don't know if I can trust you. And I know I can't trust you when in the course of our cup of coffee you say, "I probably shouldn't tell you this. I promised Bob I wouldn't." Okay, well, you're not getting anything out of me. There has to be this sense of trust that I can tell you anything.

Steve Wheeler is not here today, so I don't mind talking. I don't mind talking about him when he is here. But there's something about Wheeler. He's an attorney that in our relationship, I feel like I have client-attorney privilege with. I just have a sense of trust in him, which makes friendship easier.

And here's the fourth thing. And I don't know how you do this—is they need to be long-term relationships. I had coffee breakfast on Monday with two guys. And we go back over 30 years, the three of us. And there's something about that. You can't really fool them. Over a period of time, it just leaks out who you are and who they are.

God's Design for Friendship

God did not design you to go at this alone. And I got, as of next week, 65 years of living this thing. And friendship is really hard. I don't mean acquaintances. I don't mean people on the Christmas card list. I'm the only guy I know who's so excited because starting in about two or three weeks, I start getting those Christmas letters. I love that stuff. Bobby, he's an honor student and got a Rhodes scholarship. And Tiffany is a supermodel. I never get one that says, "Well, Bob's strung out on drugs. The last time we saw him, he was on the street in Sierra Vista, and we left him there." I never get one of those. But that'd be a great one to write.

But I love knowing what people are doing. It's cool. I love the pictures. But this friendship—you aren't meant to go this alone. And the older we get, the tougher this gets. And I think because life gets tougher, and the more you need this. People of the same gender that share your faith, that you can trust over an extended period of time.

Marriage as God's Second Provision

Now, here's the second thing that God's provided to deal with relationship. And it's not for everyone, but it's marriage. Paul's very clear when he writes that it's better to be single than married. And his motivation there is not so you can get your handicap to single digits or not you can watch whatever you want on TV, though both are appealing. His thing is, it's better to be single because you're free to go and to be wherever God wants you to be.

Well, if that's the case, and it's better, why are so many people married? I'm going to give you two. One is obvious in our discussion. The other is less obvious. The first one, Paul said, is the reason you marry is because you're burning with lust. I mean, there's one thing, and I don't know if it's the only thing, but there's one thing that's provided in marriage that you can't get, biblically, anywhere else, and that's sex. I can get a provider, I can get somebody to come along and that companionship, and I can get a golden retriever or a goldfish or a cleaning service or something. I'm not demeaning that, so don't look at me funny here. But I'm saying, he's saying the primary reason here that's exclusive to that is the sexual part of it.

Here's the fundamental rules. Single celibate, marriage, celebration. But in the context of what we're talking about, it's this idea of a partner.

Marriage as Divine Partnership

Genesis chapter 2, the Lord said, "It's not good for man to be alone, I'll make a helper suitable for him." So we stop right there. It's the first malediction in the scripture. Everything's been benediction up to there. God made the earth and sky, it's good. God made the birds, it's good. It's not good for man to be alone.

So His remedy, verse 20, is Adam, there's no suitable helper, so the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, He took one of the man's ribs and closed the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from his rib that was taken out of man and He brought her to her. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, for she was taken from man. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother, be united to his wife, and the two become one flesh."

He said, and we've got Him here on your outline, is now I have a partner for life, a man and a woman coming together, two separate becoming one, not just physically, but they come together in this design divine partnership. Marriage has with it a role. So when you read in Genesis 2:20, Adam had no suitable helper, that word is translated helper, is used in Psalm 33, Psalm 70, Psalm 115 to describe God, that man and woman have a role. So I'm a football guy.

Understanding Biblical Marriage Roles

I got a left tackle and I got a quarterback, equal in status on the ball club, but different in role. So in Ephesians five, God says, here's the design for marriage: wives submit to your husbands, husbands love your wives. Every time we teach this, we get a pushback—never on the second part, but always on the first part.

Wives submit to your husbands—well, that was cultural. Nobody ever says husbands love your wives was cultural. What God is saying is that there is in this relationship the headship of the man, that the wife is to submit. It means literally to line up under. It's not a "meet Tarzan, Jane" thing.

If you said to me, "Is Sandy in submission to you?" I would say yes. If you said, "Give me an example," I would say, I don't know. The closest I can think of is she was getting ready to run a race two or three weeks ago. I said, "Listen, if you want to run, run. Your foot's bugging you. There's no reward for this. The downside seems higher than the upside." I'm convinced if she was single, she'd have run that race. I said to her, "I won't tell you what to do, but I'll tell you what—from my perspective, if it were my call, I wouldn't have you run that race."

That's not a life or death issue, but she didn't run the race. In retrospect, she would say that was really a good decision. That's not some big decision.

Learning from Partnership Decisions

Sandy and I face decisions—always investment type things. It would always go like this: I go, "I got this business opportunity, here's this investment, here's this perspective. What do you think?" Here's what she'd say: "I don't feel good about it."

"Feel good? What do you mean feel good? Can't you read? Here are the numbers. Look at the return. You don't want 75% return on your money? What's wrong with you?" "It doesn't feel right." "What do you mean feel right? I don't get what you mean. We can't run our life on feeling."

She'd say, "I just don't know. I don't want to argue. I'm just telling you this doesn't feel right. Listen, you do whatever you want." Here's the key: when it goes south two weeks later, when she says, "How's that going?" I'd say, "Well, I don't feel like talking about it right now because it didn't go exactly the way I thought it would."

Then you go, "Hey buddy, it's your call." It's the way that I submit at church to the elders. We went through last year a building campaign. I had several people say, "What do you think about what they're building?" I said, "I don't care. They're the elders. My job is to participate. If they screw it up, that's between them and God. God's not going to judge me on that. He's going to judge me on how I participated in this building thing."

Love as Protection and Care

The submission thing's always tough, but God's got this design. He said, "Husbands love your wives." What does that mean? Well, that means to protect them.

I'm in this walk thing. I'm walking every day now. The other day I said to Sandy, "I don't feel like walking today." She said, "You don't feel like walking any day. Today is not—you didn't feel like walking yesterday, did you?" "No." "You're not going to feel like walking tomorrow. You don't feel like walking. I get it. That's okay. If you don't want to go, we won't go." I said, "No, I'll go."

We're all done, walking into the driveway. She said, "I love taking walks together." Now I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I thought, okay, she doesn't need me to exercise. By now, she's already run today. It's not a swim day, and she's probably going to go to the gym this afternoon to do something. Walking with me is not a form of exercise. She's telling me, "This makes me feel closer to you. This makes me feel like it's something we ought to do together."

Here you go now. Hang with me. Don't hold me accountable on this, just hang with me. If I love her, I ought to be going on walks with her—not because I want it or need it, but because she does.

Small Acts of Love

She taught at Tempe last night. That's at the end of the day and the end of a long day. She's going to go over there and deal with millennials, so you got issues. She's going to be tired. So I got a piece of paper and I wrote, "Welcome home. Love you. Can't wait for lunch tomorrow." We have lunch every Thursday.

To me, it's not a big deal, but here's what I know: when she saw that, I'll guarantee you she got a little smile. I don't do that because I'm a compulsive note writer. I do it because I love her, and this will show her that I love her.

Marriage as God's Gift

God designed marriage to fulfill this loneliness through partnership. Here's what He said: it's a gift from God. God gave you that partner. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with a guy and he said, "How did you know Sandy was the one for you?"

If I approached it that way, I'd never get married. Here's how I know she was the one: We stood on top of the Valley Hope and Tyler said, "Do you take her?" and I said, "Yes." He said to her, "Do you take Him?" and to my surprise, she said, "Yes." I knew at that point—here you go—she's the one. That's how I knew it.

God designed it, and I would say God put us together. How do you know? Well, because we're together. That relationship, number three, is a covenant relationship.

The Covenant of Marriage

My friend Larry Wright—we used to do these marriage conferences. Larry and Sue were the best at marriage I ever heard. I loved to listen to him. There would always be a break, and right before the break, Larry would say this. It just happened in the timing. He would pound a little bit and say, "Sue and I will never get divorced. Never, never, never, never, never, never get divorced. Never."

Every time I'd be over getting coffee and somebody would go, "Can I ask you something?" "Sure." "That's your guy, isn't it? Don't you work with him?" "Yeah." "You ought to tell him not to say that, because it's kind of..."

Larry couldn't care less. So he starts the next session by saying, "Let me tell you something, Sue and I will never, never, never, never, never get divorced." The point that he's making is this: this is not something extraordinary. Didn't you say that? I did twice. Better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health, to death do us part. That's God's design.

It's a commitment for life, and sometimes it's just that commitment that keeps you in it. I would assume, though I haven't met everybody, that everybody at some point in their married life has this moment where they go, "I'd bag this if I could." And sometimes the only thing that's keeping you together is that piece of paper, which is symbolic. Here's something that's died in our culture: your word. My word is my bond. Here's what I said. I honor it.

I've been on the giving end of this: "Repeat after me. Better, worse." That tells me up front you're acknowledging there's a worse coming. Rich or poor - going to be up, going to be down. Sickness, health - there'll be those moments. Sandy and I were walking the other day, and I'm moving along at, for me, a pretty good pace. I said, "Buddy, it wasn't that long ago that for me to walk and to get out the front door and to the street light, I had to hang on to her."

I got on my little support hose and my slippers and my robe, because it was too much work to get dressed. I would shuffle off about as far as that wall and back - it would take about 10 or 15 minutes. I couldn't get from here to there without her. That's that "sickness or health" part. This is what you said. That's God's design.

God's Design for Marriage

God's design for marriage is really simple. He gets to declare it because He created it: to be permanent, monogamous, heterosexual.

The Reality of Human Friendships

So you're alone. All those quotes that we read are absolutely real. Here's one more from Herbert Van Zeller: "The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God."

God's going to provide you this friendship. But let me tell you something: everybody that's your friend is somehow going to let you down or not rise up to the standards you see in friendship. I had a guy that came to me and he said, "Will you be my friend?" I said, "Well, my friend card's pretty full. I'm not looking for a lot of friends. I got a lot." He said, "I need a friend. Will you be my friend?" I said, "Okay, that's fine."

About a month later, he came back and said, "I don't want to be." Now we're 50 years old. I mean, we're a little old for breaking a heart in two where I keep one and he takes one. We're a little old for this, it seemed to me, but that's the language he used. He said, "You're a terrible friend. I don't want to be your friend anymore." I said, "I didn't do anything. I went to lunch with you and I listened to you. I don't know what more you want."

He said, "I thought our wives would get along together and that ain't going to happen." He was disappointed. I devastated him. I destroyed him. I didn't mean to.

The Limitations of Human Relationships

You're going to have friends that let you down or aren't going to rise up to this. You're going to have moments in marriage where that spouse didn't meet my needs, which seem to be infinite. The one place that I can go and find those needs met is Christ.

That longing that I have is never going to be met with a person, place, or thing. Some of them can be. I'm hungry right now. It's 7:42. At about 8:30, I'll order an egg white omelet and I'll eat it. For about 35 seconds, I'll be full. I have a need and an egg white omelet can meet it.

But you have this crucial longing, this thing that you were designed for, this yearning. I remember an interview with Sally Field where they were asking her about Academy Awards and all of this. She said, "Ever since I was a little girl, I had this - here's what she said, and I quote - I'll call it a longing. Something missing."

You know this. There's not enough Super Bowl trophies or Academy Awards or Salesperson of the Year awards or whatever. There's not enough. There's not enough to fill this because it's what Pascal called the God-shaped vacuum.

The God-Shaped Vacuum

You can throw all the victories in the world in there. It ain't going to make any difference. They're going to satisfy you as long as the egg white omelet satisfied me. The more you get, the less satisfying they are and the less time that they satisfy. How many trophies do you need? How many pins and plaques do you need? How much affirmation do you need? We all want it.

There's a universal loneliness, but that loneliness is not for a friend or not for a spouse. It's for God. That's what John records in John 14 as he records the words of Jesus to His disciples the night before He dies: "Ask and I will give as the Father asked the Father and He will give you another counselor. He will give you a helper. The world can't accept Him."

Then all of a sudden I have this relationship with Christ where He's my constant companion. Psalm 139: "Where do I go? You're in front of me, behind me. You know what I'm going to say before I say it." It's a constant companion. It's a familiar friend, a patient teacher. "Ask, I will remind you." It's not that God is in the world; it's that God's in you.

Christ Enriches Other Relationships

Here's the deal: as I develop that relationship with Christ, these other relationships are enriched. I was invited, oh I don't know, maybe 10 years ago now, in Northern California somewhere to do a men's conference. That's typically Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon and night, Sunday morning. After Saturday night, I'm with the guy who picked me up and the guy who kind of put it together, and they're clearly not happy and they're not happy with me. I said,

How's the weekend going? I said, "Well the rooms seem good, food seems good, music seems good. Yeah, yeah, yeah." I said, "Well we're running out of things because the only thing left is me." "You're not what we hope for." Well I've heard that a lot in my life so I can adjust.

I said, "What's the problem?" They said, "We wanted you to talk about marriage and parenting and being a better dad, being a better husband." I said, "Oh okay guys. Here's, let me tell you a little secret I discovered a long time ago. If I love God more, I'll be a better husband, I'll be a better dad."

There's some techniques I need, some awareness I need, but if my relationship with Christ is screwed up, I'm not a very good husband. If I'm not communicating with God very well, I'm not the best friend in the world.

Your Go-To Relationship

That's your go-to. It's third and one and you need a yard. Your go-to is Jesus. We could use Him tomorrow by the way, put Him in a scat bag, but you know what I'm saying? That's my go-to.

It's not to be a deeper friend. I'm not minimizing the first two-thirds of this message. I need the friends, I need the marriage, but the relationship that I need to nurture is the one with Christ. That loneliness that you feel is real and genuine and in the ultimate sense will not be met with a person, place, or thing other than Jesus.

In two weeks when we meet, we're going to talk about stress, so it gives you two weeks to get stressed up for that, and then uncertainty, then we'll take our Christmas break.