No Longer Lonely

Based on John 4

The dust plumed up beneath my feet as I walked. Even the relentless rays of the midday sun felt markedly more comfortable than the stares of the other women when I came for water in the morning. Each time I passed the few other people braving the heat, I stared at the cracked, parched ground. I have disciplined my eyes to not dart up.

I was relieved to find myself alone at the well. I could draw my water in peace and hurry back home.

I was so thirsty.

As I lowered a leather bucket into the well, a man’s voice surprised me. “Give me a drink.” I looked over to see a man who was visibly tired and dirty from a long journey. He was Jewish, and we both knew He shouldn’t be talking to me, a Samaritan and a woman.

When I asked why He spoke to me, my candor drew a kind, boyish grin across His face. “If you knew who I was, you would be asking Me for water. Whoever drinks My water, he will never be thirsty again.”

I was intrigued. My daily trips to the well were saturated with dread, with the fear of hurtful whispers or yet again being pushed away. Many times the women would immediately leave when I arrived. Their rejection stung. Every once in a while I could blend in unnoticed among the gathered crowd and listen to them laugh and share stories about their children playing nearby. Even then the loneliness stirred up in my chest, threatening to choke me.

But I had to come. I had to get water. I carried it home to drink and cook and wash in, but it didn’t ever make me feel clean. Those women, they were clean. Their lives were honorable and managed and tidy.

I wanted His water so I would no longer have to come to the well and risk the shame.

But instead of giving me the water, He asked about my husband. It felt mean, as if He knew what I ached for and was holding out.

My jar wasn’t yet full, but I wanted to escape. I answered short: “Sir, I do not have a husband.” I was bothered by how dry my mouth was. If I wasn’t so thirsty, I could run.

“I know.”

What did He know? He sat down on the rock nearest to me, searching for my eyes that were trying to avoid Him. How could He know? He is not from here.

He kindly and quietly said, “You have had five husbands, and the man you are with now, he is not your husband.”

I was caught. Everything I’d been running from, everything I’d been hiding from, He was throwing in my face. No one knew about the other husbands. They were offended enough by my current living arrangement. I had been on the run, concealing my even more sordid past. How did He know?

“You are obviously a prophet, so maybe You can answer something for me. Where are we supposed to worship? Everyone seems to have differing opinions about this.”

My back was to Him as He spoke. “I know there have been all kinds of rules in place for how to worship and love God, but everything is about to change.”

There was something about the way He said it, the authority and kindness of His words even though He knew all the shameful things I was doing my best to hide. I just had a feeling He was the One we had all been waiting for. The thought terrified me. Messiah, here now and talking to me?

“Woman, I am He. The time has come.”

I knew. I knew Yahweh had brought the Messiah to me—me!—and He knew the worst of my mistakes and yet He didn’t despise me. I was undone by His love and the hope in His eyes. Everything shifted in me. I wanted everyone to meet Him. I didn’t care if they saw me; I didn’t care if they knew. In fact, I wanted them to know. I wanted them to know that our Savior was here and He cared about me. If He wanted someone like me, then surely they would all feel wanted too.

Men came over the hill, men who seemed to know Him. I left the well, left my water jars behind, and ran toward the city. Outside the market I could see the group of women with their children. I stopped. How will they know I am serious? How will they believe me?

And then I did it, the most freeing brilliantly foolish thing in my life: I led with everything I had been hiding.

The Stream of Connection

We recently got away for a night with some good friends in the hill country of Texas.

Honestly it was one of those nights that if you looked at my Instagram feed you would have been jealous. I’m just telling you. It was a dream getaway. These are some of my very favorite, long-time friends. We’ve shared over ten years of friendship and life together with these couples, and it was just easy. You probably know how difficult it can be to make couple friends as a couple. It’s just tricky. You have to like the woman and he has to like the guy, and they have to like both of you, and then your schedules have to align, and yada, yada, yada. Anyway, we have couple friends, and we took a dream getaway sans the billion children we had produced between us all.

We sat at dinner till the restaurant closed. The waiter had set in front of us one of the most elaborate Pinterest-worthy cheese boards with fifteen types of sliced meats and gorgeous cheeses spread out. Zac’s and my very favorite food on earth, next to queso and chips, is a great cheese board.

Heaven will contain a lot of cheese.

I think we actually prefer crackers and cheese to chips and queso (and all the Texans just clutched their chests), because it isn’t as easy to scarf down. You slow down and talk and eat and look in people’s eyes.

We ate and told the stories we rarely tell about nothing important. We snorted from laughing too hard at things like how Jesse lets Janet boss him around and how obvious it is that Jesse loves it. Then we quickly transitioned to tears over Julie’s sadness that she can’t have more biological kids because of her weak heart.

We all left feeling known, feeling seen, feeling connected, feeling less alone. I remember wondering why we didn’t do slow time like this together more often.

As humans, we simultaneously crave connection and resist it.

The New York Times recently posted an article titled “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” Like everyone else who read the title, I had to know what “this” was that could cause any two random people to fall in love. The article was based on a study conducted by Dr. Arthur Aron, who successfully caused two complete strangers to fall in love.¹

The two strangers sat across from each other and asked each other a series of thirty-six questions that started with basic things like whom you’d most like to share dinner with and then gradually increased into more intimate questions like “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” and “When did you last cry in front of another person?”

At the end of the thirty-six questions, the two strangers were to stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

Have you ever tried to stare into someone’s eyes for four whole minutes?

It is no small thing to stare into someone’s soul for four minutes and all the while allow that person to stare into yours. It exposes you to feel seen like that. I think the risk usually proves too much. Most people look away. Connection is like that. Most people move away when it comes too close.

But we are not intended to live alone, to be isolated.

In the deepest part of us sits an enormous desire to connect. We crave intimate connection more than nearly any other thing, yet I would venture to say most of us feel a constant twinge of loneliness.

People surround us. We still miss each other. We can be sitting in the same room or driving in a car together and miss opportunities to really see each other, to really hear each other. We quickly move on like this and miss Jesus too. Loneliness can have a strange power over us. It tricks us into believing we are the only ones who are lonely. So we stifle the desire to share our most constant nagging fears and insecurities, while nearly every other human walking around does the same.

Recently a good friend handed me a book called Becoming Human. Jean Vanier wrote in it,

I discovered the terrible feeling of chaos that comes from extreme loneliness….

We all have this drive to do things that will be seen by others as valuable, things that make us feel good about ourselves and give us a sense of being alive. We only become aware of loneliness at times when we cannot perform or when imagination seems to fail us.

Loneliness can appear as a faint dis-ease, an inner dissatisfaction, a restlessness in the heart….

When people are physically well, performing creatively, successful in their lives, loneliness seems absent. But I believe that loneliness is something essential to human nature; it can only be covered over, it can never actually go away….

Loneliness in one form is, in fact, essential to our humanity….

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urges mystics to a deeper union with God….

Loneliness, then, can be a force for good.²

He basically says, I don’t care what your Instagram says or how many friends you have on Facebook. Every human being is lonely.

And something about that is terrible, and something about that is comforting.

CALLED OUT OF HIDING

As much as I adored our getaway to west Texas, a surprising thing happened. The day after we came home from the Instagram-worthy trip, I woke up, and guess what I felt?

Lonely.

One day after I had just done the thing I so needed, I so craved, I woke up lonely. It wasn’t because I missed them. It was because I had accidentally been thinking that the perfect getaway with the perfect people and a lot of cheese was supposed to fill my soul.

Somewhere I’d believed, If we take this trip together, it’ll be a memory maker. We will bond, we will have deep talks—everything I am craving. It will be amazing.

And you know what? It was. It was all the things that I hoped that it would be.

But it still did not fill my soul.

Here’s what I believe is happening: We are so lonely and we do not feel known; we do not feel understood. We do not feel connected to people in a really deep way because we are expecting them to fill something that only God can fill.

So, in our pursuit of deep connection, we have to recognize that we can often look to good things like community, authenticity, confession to take the place of connecting with Jesus. Loneliness is meant to be an invitation to draw closer to God. But our tendency is to try frantically first to meet that need with people, to prove to ourselves that we are lovable and funny and worthy of attention.

We are made for dependency on God. We were built for that. Because God is invisible we put our neediness on people, and that becomes unhealthy one hundred percent of the time. It’s called codependency. If we connect with people and we don’t connect with God, we end up asking people to be our enough. People will always eventually disappoint you. Don’t be surprised. They aren’t enough either.

Only God has the resources and ability to exhaustively meet your needs. Yes, we also were designed to need human relationships, but they can never be enjoyed if we’re using them to replace the ultimate relationship. When we begin to find our deepest, most fundamental needs met in God, then we will go from using people to meet our needs to enjoying people despite the ways they disappoint us.

Community is meant to point us to Jesus, not replace Him.

Until we make that shift in our expectations, we continually go back into hiding because it’s too painful to be known. But we give the illusion of sharing ourselves, a little like how the woman at the well said, “I have no husband”—telling a little of the truth, but not enough to reveal her brokenness.

And while you and I may not be hiding from women around the well anymore, we often are hiding from being truly known. We post a version of our lives on social media and we share a version over coffee, but does anyone really know us?

Who knows that you lost your mind on your kids last week?

Who knows that you haven’t talked to your dad in a year because of hurt?

Who knows you had an abortion in college?

Who knows you are sad?

Who knows you are lonely?

I am learning there is a difference between vulnerability and transparency. Vulnerability is the edited disclosure of personal feelings or parts of ourselves. Transparency is exposing the unedited, unfiltered, unflattering parts of our souls. I will be vulnerable with you in these pages, but let’s be fair: it is an edited version of a selected sample of my worst thoughts and moments. Vulnerability is precious and useful and can serve great purposes, and it’s as far as we need to go with most acquaintances and for sure as far as we should go for Facebook. But transparency is necessary with our closest people and especially with God. It’s the only way we can truly be known. But it’s a scary thought that sends us into hiding.

Our new hiding places include things like Instagram posts, a cute outfit from Anthropologie, obedient kids, an organized home, a meaningful job. But no matter what we arrange on the outside, we can’t hide our eyes. Eyes reveal so much about our souls, and you know what I see when I look into the eyes of people I meet, people like you who are trying to do and be their best?

I see thirst.

What are we thirsty for?

The woman at the well was so thirsty.

She was thirsty to be seen.

She was thirsty to be loved.

She was thirsty to be right with people and God.

She was thirsty to be whole.

I think of how thirsty she must have been, waiting till midday to collect her water, wishing she didn’t have to go, wishing she didn’t need anything, wishing that she didn’t have to come out of hiding.

We all wish we didn’t need things outside of ourselves. We try to prove we don’t need anyone. We take pride in going it alone, in making it through a rough week without seeking help. We may barely realize it, but we all are doing that.

This quote from C. S. Lewis helps explain why:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one….Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.³

To love is to be vulnerable. Yet just as God built us to need water and food every few hours, we are built to never be self-sufficient. Our needs and our thirst eventually bring us out of hiding. Then the water we choose to drink will determine whether we return to hiding or discover how to enjoy our lives again, to enjoy people and relationship again, to enjoy Him again.

Jesus calls us out of hiding.

Jesus calls us to taste the living water that wells up and sets free and washes and restores.

Jesus says, Let Me be your enough. You will be filled and you will be known and you will be free.

And our enemy pushes us back into hiding so we cannot enjoy God and our people and eventually our lives. It is very difficult to even want to be fully engaged and present if we don’t like ourselves and our lives. There are so many possible reasons that you might not like your life—hurt, regret, burnout, demands, conflict. Something about an encounter with Jesus is enough to change all that.

But first we have to come out. Like the woman at the well, we have to risk exposure.

Jesus met her at the well when she risked coming out of hiding. Then He exposed her shame in the middle of the day, and it could have been the meanest thing. Unless He actually had the answer to her biggest problem.

Maya was born and raised in India. She grew up in a good family and married a man her parents believed to be good and respectable. The wedding was a beautiful occasion, and her mother cried tears of joy.

Just days later Maya was being physically abused. Over time she suffered a broken neck, cracked spine, broken teeth and jawbone, and more. With her theater background, she was good at masking her grief and fear, but there was no peace, sleep, or security in her life. She started to experience blackouts. At first they were minutes, and then the gaps stretched into longer chunks of time.

One day, her abuser handed her the phone and said, “Call your dad. Tell him all that I’m doing to you.” She begged her husband not to make her reveal her shame. She knew it would kill her parents to know of her pain. When her father answered, she later said, it was “the darkest moment of my life.”

At that moment, she decided to run away. She managed to flee to Mumbai with few clothes and little money. To support herself, she would do street theater with street kids. Local traffickers who abused and exploited the kids thought Maya’s teaching was interfering with their business. One day these men beat her.

She fled again.

The blackouts continued, and she ended up in a wheelchair, totally broken in body and spirit. She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t stop drooling. From her perspective, “Every shred of dignity left was lost.” Eventually, she was reunited with her family, and they helped Maya to heal in many ways.

Today, Maya uses notes to speak. She’s lost the sharp memory of a theater performer who could memorize all her lines. But when she speaks, she speaks of the One who knew her, who saw her, who loved her through every one of those dark days.

“My testimony is this,” she says. “It was God, it is God, it will always be God all the while. Like you and everyone else sitting in this room, I wanted it to be simple. I wanted a normal life. I just wanted to be happy. Don’t you want to be happy?”

Then she says, “Maybe God didn’t want something normal for me. Yes, it was a terrible story, but He’s using the story that I am still struggling to be proud of to bring me to a place where I’m rescuing slaves from bondage.”

Now Maya leads a team with International Justice Mission, the world’s largest international antislavery organization. They work in a nation where 11.1 million people are enslaved, and Maya and her colleagues have freed more than ten thousand people in their country alone.

She bravely shared her story at IF:Gathering in 2016, where she said, “Ten thousand names and faces I may have never known or seen if my life had been totally normal and going perfectly well. Ten thousand individual human beings with stories of pain turned into hope.”

To see her share with boldness on that stage was breathtaking. “Be that story, sisters. Let not that shame from the past restrain you. Go—go with joy, with confidence; go boldly with courage. And all the pain that held you back and held you there from not doing things. Go with a spirit of love and compassion and righteous anger against injustice. Just show up. Go.”

Sometimes we think that Jesus is mean and unloving when He calls us out of hiding, when He exposes our flaws and brokenness and pain. But He calls us to set us free.

THE TABLE WE WANT

Nothing hijacks identity like fear. Fear speaks a dark narrative over our lives, over who we think we are. Fear tells us that we are defined by our worst mistakes rather than by our God or that we are defined by our image rather than by the image of the One who died for us.

Satan loves a man alone. If he can isolate you, he can make you believe whatever he wants.

Satan wants you shut down and living in his lies, believing you have to hide, believing you are not enough. He wants you focused on yourself and on your problems and on your sin, not fighting for the glory of God and fighting for souls. He wants you living in fear in this world rather than looking forward to an eternity that is for sure coming. So he will distract you with Netflix.

Downton Abbey, to be exact.

You know one of the fascinating things about Downton Abbey? The family doesn’t go downstairs very often, and the servants don’t go up except to serve. They certainly don’t sit on the upstairs furniture. In the social hierarchy of the time, there was a dividing wall between the rich and the poor, those who were worthy and those who were not.

Our God came to take away the walls dividing family from servants. Our God says, Guess what? You don’t stay downstairs in the servants’ quarters. Come upstairs and be part of My family and enjoy the riches and goodness of life I give to My children.

This is your worth, this is your value, this is who you are. For eternity. No circumstance, no person, no mistake, no lie in your own head can steal it. It is true. You can believe the lies of the enemy that keep you fearful and hiding in the shadows, but it will not for one second shift what is true.

Our identity is secure. We are part of the family, but you and I too often hesitate to go upstairs and enjoy it. We stay downstairs in hiding. We know in heaven we will be with God, at His table and enjoying Him and all He has for us.

But for goodness’ sake, if we can go upstairs today and have a great meal and enjoy the gracious Downton lifestyle, I’d like to do that!

You are a child of God, adopted by the King, made to be—are you ready for this?—a coheir with Christ. Crazy, right? A coheir. Whatever Jesus Christ gets in heaven is our inheritance too. Amazing. This is our identity. Don’t you know God is looking at us saying, You are in My family. You are My kid. Why on earth are you hiding in the basement?

When we hide, we diminish ourselves, we diminish our worth, we diminish our belief in God.

Maybe you believe that you are invited to the big table upstairs, but fear and suffering and pressure and shame block your path up the stairwell. I know it can feel complicated. But like the woman at the well, we don’t have to let our circumstances keep us trapped in hiding.

Nothing changed that day for the woman at the well. Her circumstances were the same. Her shame should have been the same. Nothing changed. Except that everything changed. Because she had a new story. Her identity shifted at the well. Because Jesus.

The woman at the well entered a bigger narrative. She was no longer defined by her sin and weakness. God was defining her. She had nothing to prove. At the well Jesus said, in essence, I came here to get you, adulterer. To get you, sinner. To get you, the most broken in the city. The one who is hiding. I came for you. You will tell the city about Me. I pick you to announce salvation to this city.

The Father is seeking such people to worship Him, and I pick you.

She hears this and then she does something unthinkable.

She runs to everyone she was hiding from. She doesn’t just run to them; she runs telling them about her sin! I think the Messiah is here, and He knew my sin. She leads with everything she has always tried to hide.

Is she crazy?

Or is she changed? Or is she free? See, the reason we hide is because we don’t know what it feels like to live wholly forgiven. We’ve never known what it means to truly enjoy our lives, to run into a crowd with no shame, no fear, no guilt, no proving ourselves, no performance. Just us. With the amazing news of a Savior who happens to change lives.

He arrests us with His forgiveness and His grace, and He absolutely sets us free. He does not need us to perform. He is not here for a show. We just get to run with Him. It doesn’t make sense and it’s kind of messy—but it’s wild and fun and what we are meant to do when the Spirit is filling us with everything our souls have craved.

Being known is what happens when you realize you are already known and, because of Jesus, you are already accepted. You don’t have to keep searching for what you already have. The living water that eternally quenches our souls is filling us up. In fact, Jesus says it’s not just filling you; it’s welling up in you and pouring out of you. The living water floods in when we embrace our identity as children of God. The living water floods in and pours out when we have nothing left to prove and nothing left to hide. God is here, and we now run in freedom and share the worst of our lives because we are forgiven and new.

Just look what it did for the woman at the well:

She went from shame and hiding to being fully known and accepted.

She went from avoiding people to engaging everyone around her.

She went from thirsting for someone or something to fill her to being completely satisfied.

She went from wasting her life on sin to fulfilling her God-given purposes.

She went from embarrassed to overflowing with joy.

A SWEET AND WILD FREEDOM

Sudden drastic change. It still happens today.

Not long after I returned from my perspective-shifting experience at the lodge in Canada, I was surprised to receive a phone call. It was someone I respected and liked, but when I answered the phone, I immediately was greeted with her extreme disapproval.

I sat paralyzed, braced for my typical spiral into panic. But something was different. I was okay.

I’d let go of striving and measuring up and performing.

And I’d embraced my inadequacy and sin. I’d embraced Jesus’s overwhelming grace.

Something had changed. The usual adrenaline rush to turn someone’s disapproval around didn’t kick in. As she called me arrogant and unwise, it felt like a fist landing deep in my gut. Each punch had its turn, and each time I collected myself and felt a strange peace and resolve.

I calmly replied, “I know. You are right. I am arrogant and often unwise. And I am so sorry. Will you forgive me for the hurt I have caused you?”

This was a sweet and wild freedom flowing out of my intimate connection to God.

No defense.

No hiding.

No shame.

No running.

Yep. I am a disaster. I am caught and I am okay because I am forgiven. Today, I am closer to that friend than I was before that call. It is a counterintuitive move to put it all out there, but we are already caught. God knows we are prone to wander, and most days we know it too. How fun to not live trying to cover it up anymore. In fact, it is usually in the dirt of all that makes us human that the deepest, best parts of life and hope take root.

A sudden, drastic, awesome change.

The end of pretending and protecting.

The beginning of life-giving connection.

It reminds me of an episode of Friends when Phoebe calls out her friends’ flaws. She says that Monica is high maintenance and Rachel is a pushover. They get mad and go to lunch without her in retaliation. Later, they approach Phoebe. Rachel says, “We are very sorry to tell you this, but you, Phoebe, are flaky.” Monica says, “Hah!” But instead of defending herself, Phoebe throws back her head and laughs. She says, “That’s true. I am flaky.”

It is so refreshingly backwards to admit our weakness, rather than defend and cover it.

It is terrifying to be caught in our brokenness. But more terrifying than being caught is being alone and in the dark with all of our pride intact. Healing and wholeness are found only when we step into the rushing stream of forgiveness, of intimacy, of connection.

Step into the water.

It’s time to get caught because it’s time you live free! It is terrifying, but Jesus’s grace and freedom are waiting on the other side.

We all live with a deep need to be fully known and fully loved. No one does that perfectly on earth, but if we never risk being vulnerable, we will never get close to being known and truly loved. Risk it!

STEP INTO THE STREAM

What is the thing you are hiding? You may feel like there really is nothing too big, but all of us are hiding away sin, most often from ourselves. Ask God to show you any impure motive or sin that you may not be aware of.

WADE IN DEEPER

Even more terrifying is confessing this to someone else. But it’s part of getting free. Share the sin you are hiding with a trustworthy person, someone gracious and safe. Remember you are not alone. Around the world thousands of women are doing this too.

QUENCH YOUR THIRST

Gather some friends, safe people who have proven their love for you over time, and build a fire in a fire pit.

As you sit around the fire, share your story—all the parts, including the messy ones. Tell them you want them to know the mistakes you’ve made and the grace you are now experiencing. See what happens. I bet you will be around that fire for a while, and I bet your honesty will start a ripple effect, giving others permission to share their sin. I’m praying for all of you as you bravely go here.

THE OVERFLOW

Write a thank-you note to a friend who has shared vulnerably with you, and tell that friend how it impacted you.