Feeling alone while believing

This week I received several messages from people feeling alone. Separately, it seemed. One of them stuck with me: someone was having a hard time at home, had prayed, and had directly asked God if He still thought of her. When she received an encouraging message from us, she replied: ‘You are the angels who brought the answer.’

That sentence stuck with me.

Not because it was about us. But because it reveals something about how faith actually works in difficult moments, and that is rarely how we imagine it.

Feeling alone is not the same as being alone

Most people who write to me about loneliness do indeed believe that God exists. They don't doubt His existence, they doubt His involvement. That is a crucial distinction. It's easy to believe when everything is going well, when blessings pile up and you can see them with the naked eye. At such moments, faith costs you little.

But at the moment when things get difficult, when you are challenged, and you still keep seeking that bond with God: only then do you show what truly matters to you. Job understood that like no other. His possessions, his health, his children, everything was taken from him, and yet he said: ‘Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him’ (Job 13:15). That is not blind optimism. That is a choice, made at the moment when that choice costs the most.

I think that's the core. Not: do you feel God? But: do you keep seeking Him, even when you don't feel Him?

Why doesn't God make it easier for Himself?

Here the easy answer stops, and frankly, that's necessary too. Because the obvious objection is: if God truly cares so much about that relationship, why does He so often leave us groping in the dark? Why not simply be palpable, unmistakably present, every single day?

I think the answer lies in what presence without absence would do to a relationship. A child who never knows hunger doesn't appreciate bread. A believer who never doubts never truly chooses. The moments when you don't feel Him are not the moments when He is absent; they are the moments when your choice to seek Him anyway truly means something. That doesn't make it less heavy. It does make it more meaningful.

There's a parable I often use, about a man whose house is about to be flooded. The police come to warn him, but he refuses to leave: he trusts in God. The water rises, the fire department comes with a boat, he refuses again. Eventually, a helicopter arrives, and he also turns that down. He drowns. When he meets God, he reproaches Him: ‘I trusted completely in You, and You didn't save me.’ To which God replies: ‘I sent you the police. I sent you a boat. I sent you a helicopter. What more did you expect?’

That is precisely why I think so many people feel alone, even though help is within reach. They are looking for a sign that is bigger, clearer, more spectacular than what is already in front of their noses.

A notebook, and the courage to ask for help

Concrete advice helps more than theology alone. Take a notebook and write down at least one blessing every evening. Some days that will be easy. Other days the only thing you can write down will be: thank You that I got out of bed today. That is also a blessing. And on the days you are in a slump yourself, you read that notebook back, and you see in black and white what you otherwise would have forgotten.

But there is something else, and that is perhaps even more difficult than being grateful: daring to admit that you need help. Most people offer help more easily than they accept it. Tell someone ‘let me know if I can do something’, and the answer is almost always ‘no, it’s okay’. We are not made to express our need out loud. And yet that is exactly what is needed, because help that is only offered and never asked for often remains just an offer.

Be the angel you are looking for

As far as I'm concerned, that is the task for those who do not feel alone: do not wait for someone to ask for help. Get in the car. Make soup and take it away. Do the small chore someone is too ashamed to ask for. That costs you more than five minutes of your life, and that is precisely the point.

And for those who do feel alone: dare to say that you miss Him. Dare to pray, even if it’s just one sentence: Heavenly Father, I feel alone, please help me. Not because that prayer immediately changes your feeling. But because it is the choice that matters at this moment.

Try it this week. Write down a blessing. Or call someone you know is feeling alone. Both are a form of the same prayer.