Gods Outrageous Claims by Lee Strobel

Author:Lee Strobel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-03T16:45:25+00:00

OUTRAGEOUS CLAIM #8

God Has a Cure FOR YOUR Secret Loneliness

Celebrities don’t blush anymore when news breaks that they’re pregnant outside of marriage. Using recreational drugs doesn’t have the stigma it once had in Hollywood. Divorce? Arrests? Movie stars bear their souls five nights a week on Entertainment Tonight. And checking into the Betty Ford Clinic has almost become a rite of passage for those in the public spotlight.

But there’s one admission that people are loathe to make, whether they’re a star on television or someone who fixes televisions in a repair shop. It’s just too embarrassing. It penetrates too deeply to the core of who they are. And when writer Marla Paul reluctantly confessed it in a newspaper column, she was secretly hoping no one would read it.

Her admission: she was lonely.

Loneliness is such a humiliating malady that it ought to have its own politically correct euphemism: “relationally challenged.” Or its own telethon. Anything to make it safer to confess. Because right now it’s a taboo, an affliction of loners and misfits. And—to be honest—of respectable people like you and me.

“The loneliness saddens me,” Marla wrote. “How did it happen that I could be forty-two years old and not have enough friends?” She said some changes in her life — including moving to a different state and deciding to work at home — ruptured her circle of relationships and “it seems as if every woman’s friendship quota has been filled and she is no longer accepting new applicants.”

She finally asked her husband, “Is it me?” She was starting to wonder. Or were people just too busy for new friends? Were they so enmeshed in existing relationships that they were closed off to any new acquaintances? “Or,” she added, “am I just imagining that everyone else has this tight coterie of fellowship except me?”

She ended her column this way:

I think there are women out there who don’t know how lonely they are. It’s easy enough to fill up the day with work and family.

But no matter how much I enjoy my job and love my husband and child, they are not enough.

I recently read my daughter Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling. I felt an immediate kinship with this bird who flies from place to place looking for the creatures with whom he belongs. He eventually finds them.

I hope I do too.1

feeling like a warthog

Then something surprising happened.

The day after Marla’s column appeared, the telephone started ringing. People stopped her on the street and at her daughter’s school. Letters poured in from housewives, executives, and university professors. The column generated seven times more mail than usual.

“They wanted to share their frustration and estrangement,” Marla said. “All were tremendously relieved to discover they weren’t the only ones.”

Wrote one working mother of two, from a prestigious Chicago suburb, “The column helped ease my growing paranoia that I was becoming a social outcast for no reason that I could fathom.” Added a woman from a rural community, “Now I know it’s not because I have red hair and a pug nose.

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