What if he meant it this way?

the monthly letter

We’re rounding the curve into fall, yet summer’s scent is still strong on my skin. Like I feel about the pool toys piled in the large tub on my back porch, I’m not ready to pack it away.

Summer was rich for me, but mostly in ways I wouldn’t have wanted it to be — until it was … and I knew I needed it to be this way. One of several vignettes of unmet expectations was our annual family beach trip.

Once a year, we drive through five states over two days to spend a week at the beach with my family. Just two passengers on an eighteen-plus hour road trip might likely feel cramped. We have nine. Nine bags, nine beach towels, snacks for nine, sleep comforts for nine -- “my favorite pillow,” favorite stuffed animals, and favorite teenage blankets (the down comforter I inherited from a college roommate twenty years ago that is now Eden’s and steadily losing feathers wherever it goes).

When the massive sliding door of the oversized van we drive opens, the wall of snacks and luggage lined against it topples onto the pavement … every time. We’re a carnival.

I make lists and place orders for a week, and then we pack for two days, all in preparation for the six days we’ll spend at the beach. The disproportionate nature of the investment and preparation for this trip compared to the time spent with our feet in the sand and playing water games with cousins in the pool fades at first glance of the ocean every year.

Except this year, my body tanked just as we arrived at the beach house.

For days into a week and beyond, the glands in my neck swelled up like golf balls, taking all my energy to swallow, much less talk. I spent most of the beach trip either in bed or half-present and foggy. Kids biked the rambling paths of this South Carolina beach town and built sand castles without me. Nate lugged bags of beach towels down to the beach and sandy bottoms back up to the beach house as I struggled to sip water with a straw. (He also had a birthday there, during which I spent the entire day in bed.)

The conversations with nieces and nephews and late-night games and catch-ups with my siblings didn’t happen this year. The world went on without me, and I merely endured the beach trip for which I’d spent a week preparing and from which I’d spent days unpacking.

One of the nights of the trip, as I heard the laughter from the games downstairs — games for which my voice couldn’t carry, and my energy level couldn’t sustain — I moped while getting myself to bed.

This week felt like a microcosm of so much of my life: me, standing on the other side of the glass storefront, watching life happen inside, but a life I couldn’t reach. I observed it all from the wrong side. Had this week not come after many instances like it, where I knew what I wanted, but my life limited me from having it, it might not have carried the emotional weight.

I toggled between praying, crying to God, and complaining, and then this question dropped into my mind: “what if I meant it this way?”

Hmmm … I thought. Surely this sickness is the devil or the result of carelessness on my part. But … God?

I don’t venture to guess whether the question was from Him, but that phrase bounced around my head all night and stuck with me throughout the rest of the summer.

We were made for relationships. It is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Arguably, the deepest craving of the human heart is for connectedness: to be known, seen, understood, and loved.

And if you’re like me, you stop there. You reach — in subtle and overt ways — to push against the tide of loneliness. Surely loneliness isn’t intended to be a part of the human experience.

We angle to be included. We swiftly press our way through or around conflict so as to not feel that gaping hole of relational loss. We do the acrobatics required to fit into the crowd or the small group or put heavy expectations on others to help us not feel the inevitable darkness of …

loneliness.

It’s like a four-letter word in our Christian circles. Surely if I admit to it, something is wrong with me. So many opportunities to connect, to find community, and not to be alone in this world (and which God even said it was not good for me to be).

We feel shame about our loneliness, embarrassed about the hole inside of (dare I say) every one of us that just can’t seem to get filled. We work hard — real hard — to avoid experiencing that lonely-shame and, if we do, not to let anyone see it.

And yet sometimes our lonely is holy.

“What if I meant it this way,” this inscrutable phrase in my head left a strong impression this summer.

Sidelined from the one time a year I’m with my entire extended family — all of them who share a state and holidays and traditions beyond our beach trip (as we live multiple states away) — and yet I was gifted perspective that reaches beyond my family into the sidelines of football and lacrosse games and the auditorium filled with proud parents and the zero-entry baby pool and the brand new home church.

Sometimes He allows the rift in the relationship, the misunderstanding, the in crowd from which you’re standing outside, the lack of an invitation … because there are parts of your heart and mine that only surface when we’re lonely.

The deep hole inside of you, that you’re convinced would find relief with a best friend or a boyfriend or a mom who really gets you or a small group, may one day see some measure of that relief (because, yes, we were not meant to be alone) … but in the meantime, perhaps He meant it that way.

You may be the fully-confident socialite at the party, yet also carry that sometimes-dark, unnerving, disconcerting feeling that something isn’t right when you brush up against your lonely.

This part, the ominous, quivering-for-fear-of-loss part of your lonely, requires a unique but rarely-experienced reach from God.

We want depth of connection with God, yet we spin our wheels and our schedule, fighting fiercely not to be alone — not to be on the other side of the picture window, looking in, not being in.

So the person not looking your way, the group of which you feel on the fringe, the invite you didn’t get … what if He meant it that way?

(Friends, sometimes He prunes the good stuff.)

What if you’re not forever alone but lonely on purpose?

{I write deeper and more candidly about the topics in my monthly newsletter over here. Consider joining us.}

Until next month,

Sara