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Welcome to The Overflow—the bonus round of faith and real-life conversation with Brandon and Susan Thomas. Every week, they unpack the powerful insights, behind-the-scenes experiences, and personal reflections that didn’t quite fit into Sunday’s sermon.
This is where the conversation gets practical, honest, and a little bit unscripted. Whether it's an encouraging word, a deeper dive into Scripture, or a hilarious moment from their week, Brandon and Susan bring fresh perspective and spiritual fuel to keep you going.
It’s real talk, fresh takes, and full hearts.
These are the conversations too good to cut and too real to miss.
For almost thirty years, I've had the privilege to walk with many people in places of pain, counseling hundreds of people, marriages, families, individuals. And there's been a pattern all throughout these years and all throughout these individuals that there is an epidemic, and we're gonna talk about it today. The epidemic of loneliness.
Speaker 2:Welcome to The Overflow. And today, Susan, like you said, this is an epidemic. Yes. It is the epidemic of loneliness. Yes.
Speaker 2:And you've seen it with your counseling.
Speaker 1:I have.
Speaker 2:I've seen it pastoring. We've both seen it in the local church. Loneliness is brutal. It is so hard.
Speaker 1:Well, there's not a person who hasn't tasted loneliness. I think it is part of the human condition truly where we find ourselves as people in a deep place of feeling all alone. And what's fascinating to me is that it's not always about the proximity of other people. We can be physically alone, isolated from others, and deep inside long for those connections. But also, we could be in a marriage.
Speaker 1:We've often said that one of the loneliest places is not being single, but being in a bad marriage. That can be a very, very lonely place. I myself remember the the time in my life where I got married a little older than a lot of my friends and people around me were getting married. And I remember the loneliness in that season where for me, I desired that companion. I desired that relationship and God walking me through that season of life and that season of unique kind of loneliness.
Speaker 1:I mean, you could be standing in a crowd of people and feel very, very alone. It's interesting. There's statistics, you know, all sorts flying around. The American Psychiatric Association tells us from one of their studies they did, I believe, in 2023, where they found that people responded one out of three being lonely at the minimum once a week for over the course of a year. Wow.
Speaker 1:And I don't believe that does it justice. I believe it's far greater than that. That's just one study where they pulled some people. But one out of three able to verbalize, I am lonely. How many more people are not self aware?
Speaker 1:Are not because most of us do not live truly self aware of what's going on on the inside of me and will act out in many different ways, often destructive, but we don't know what's really going on. Well, loneliness often can be a part of what's going on on the inside of us, leading to some really broken patterns as we try to resolve our own issue.
Speaker 2:You know, when you said loneliness is not just the absence of people, a lot of people feel lonely and they're surrounded. It reminded me, have you heard the lyrics of the song from the Smiths? Morrissey, do know the Smiths? Do you them?
Speaker 1:You are my DJ. And you know every song really known to man, so, no, I I don't.
Speaker 2:You know that? The song is how soon is now?
Speaker 3:There's a club where you like to go. You could meet somebody Wow. Who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry and you want a doctor.
Speaker 1:You honestly could be a rock star.
Speaker 2:No. Oh, yeah. Are so sweet.
Speaker 1:You actually sing really good.
Speaker 2:No. That wasn't good. But listen
Speaker 1:But he's sad. He's
Speaker 2:really miserable. There's a club where you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you wanna die. And those words to me are so powerful because it is reflecting, it is loneliness, and it's talking about how you're utterly surrounded by people, and you're totally alone.
Speaker 1:Well, that lyric also points out something so interesting. Again, music reflects humanity oftentimes. That person was going there with a purpose. They were hoping
Speaker 2:To not be alone.
Speaker 1:They had a hope. Maybe I'll meet someone who will really love me, and then I stand alone, and I leave alone. Yeah. And that is such a snapshot picture.
Speaker 3:Homie, you're crying, you want to
Speaker 1:die. Wow. I'm kinda wanna be alone. I'm just kidding. I love you, and I love your singing.
Speaker 1:You actually have a really good voice. But this loneliness epidemic, I believe we have to talk about it, identify it, and and reveal how it impacts us regularly. And it's fascinating to me that this is not something that is current. This is something that has been since the beginning of time. And I'm gonna talk about that in a second, but I'll just share my life.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's moments that I've felt lonely, felt alone. But I can remember one, again, I I was that young adult. I had just graduated from college. And at the time, we really don't have cell phones. We don't have, you know, all those connections.
Speaker 1:And I'd moved into a little apartment, and my roommate wasn't there yet, and my parents weren't there yet. And I I had all my suitcases and my boxes, and I was sitting in the middle of the floor of that apartment, and the phones hadn't been connected yet. And I will never forget. I had this moment where I thought, no one knows where I am right now. If they wanted to find me, they don't know how to reach me.
Speaker 1:They don't know where I am. And I felt utterly alone. And it was a despondent feeling. It was a feeling of, you know, does do people love me? And I knew 30 people
Speaker 2:plus years later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember all these years later. It was just so profound. It was a heaviness. And I knew people loved me.
Speaker 1:I had, you know, sweet family and friendships, but it was a a moment where the aloneness was so profound. And it it strikes me. You know, I love the bible so much. And for a million reasons, it's the it's the way God reveals who he is to us. And yet God also is so kind, like a good physician, to give clarity to our situation and to diagnose us.
Speaker 1:And Genesis two eighteen was one of those major moment verses for me. And actually, we were young marrieds when the first time I heard this, when the light bulbs just came on everywhere, and and a man was teaching us
Speaker 2:about you in our living room. I was you were sitting before me as I was teaching my young bride theology.
Speaker 1:My beloved.
Speaker 2:I was instructing you in the ways of the Lord.
Speaker 1:That is not true at all. That is not true. Do you remember the guy who helped us with premarital counseling? It was him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was Dave Ferguson.
Speaker 1:I think it was him. I think we had a privilege to sit and listen to him
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And he was talking about this passage in Genesis two verse 18.
Speaker 2:I know exactly where we were.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he was taking us back to the beginning. And we do that all the time in our church, taking our church back to the beginning because it explains so much. In Genesis two, if you know the story, things were still good. Things were still perfect in God's relationship with man and man's relationship with God, in Adam and Eve's relationship.
Speaker 1:Well, actually, Eve wasn't on the scene yet, but just all of humanity, it was perfect. And in that moment, the scripture says in Genesis two eighteen after God has said, this is good. It is good. It is good. All of a sudden, it's like everything comes to a screeching halt in creation, and god says, it is not good for man to be alone.
Speaker 1:It is not good for a man to be alone. And you could scratch your head and think, well, did he mess up? Is he having a moment of, oh, no. What have we done? What are we going to do?
Speaker 2:And it wasn't just a theological cleanup on Aisle 3.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That it wasn't sin. Right. Sin had not yet entered the garden.
Speaker 1:There was no sin.
Speaker 2:It's that God wasn't finished.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Like, not I'm not this isn't good because I'm not yet ready to call it good. Yes. Because what did he do? When he would create, he would say, and it was good, And it was good. I'm not yet ready to call this good Yes.
Speaker 2:Because it's unfinished.
Speaker 1:It's unfinished. And he was stopping down to make a forever point that he wanted written in the word of God. Because sometimes we, as as even Christ followers and just in our super spiritual efforts, can say, all I need is Jesus. And that is true. All we need is Jesus.
Speaker 1:And Jesus, in his authority, said, I've created you also for relationship with people. And so God made a point that it's not good for man to be alone. And then what was so beautiful is he was the one who solved the problem of man's aloneness through the creation of Eve. And out of that relationship came every other relationship that we have on this earth. And so we were created for relationship.
Speaker 1:But what I marvel at is that if it wasn't good then, before sin, if it wasn't good when things were perfect, how much more horrible is our aloneness today and the loneliness that we feel today? And you just talk talk about it for a moment. You know, I'd love to just look at our culture and all our attempts.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that it's so amazing when you see the failure of social media. You see the failure of technology. The promise of technology was we're going to be more connected. The promise of social media, we will be more connected, yet we've never been more lonely. You wanna know what that means?
Speaker 2:The answer is not social media. The answer is not technology. The answer is God. Yeah. God is the one who made us to be relational, communal beings.
Speaker 2:He made us that way, and in our broken state, we drift toward loneliness and isolation because of sin that broke everything, Genesis three, and now we try to fix ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we do.
Speaker 2:We try to, okay, well, I'll have connectivity with technology, or connectivity with phones, or connectivity with no. It's not gonna do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was reading an article recently, and it was talking about Snapchat and just the streaks that people try to maintain on Snapchat. And, basically, a streak is where every single day you're sending some sort of picture, some sort of chat to the person on the other end so that you can keep up your streak. And that streak, honestly, represents relationship. But, you know, I geek out on everything psychology, and I I was it was talking about and I immediately was taken to Pavlov's dogs, which was a which was a study, a research project where they tried to see if they could get dogs to salivate just at the sound of a bell.
Speaker 1:And so it started off with introducing food and ringing a bell. And then eventually, all they had to do was ring a bell and not even have any food at all. Just ring the bell and the dog would salivate. And it was a reward based research project. Well, in a similar way, I find it fascinating that those Snapchat streaks, it's like Pavlov's dogs.
Speaker 1:It's like we've we we get this reward that if I receive a picture of you pointing your camera to a ceiling, then we are in relationship. I'm I'm trying to seek the reward of relationship, but the reality is the other end of that Snapchat, there may be no relationship. This could be with people I don't even talk to, that I don't even have interaction with, And yet I'm on this wheel trying to maintain relationships that could also be completely fabricated. They're not even real. And the flip side of that is the panic sometimes or just the the the feeling of, oh, I've gotta hurry up and do that snap.
Speaker 1:It's almost the end of the day. I haven't done that. We're gonna lose our streak as though that means you're going to lose your relationship. There's this desire to keep up and try to grab these relationships when in reality, in a situation like Snapchat, sometimes it's not even a real relationship at all.
Speaker 2:And even in America, you know, we are in our culture built on this rugged individualism, and we have this concept of the power of the individual. That has incredible power because God has gifted us, he has his, his stamp upon us, though it's broken in sin. And then you have the opposite, you have places like China or Russia, where they've attempted no individualism, and the answer is not in the middle, the answer is with both. You are an individual, be who you are, but not outside of the context of others. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we have lost some of that. We get in our cars, and we drive up, everybody now drives up, and they pull into their garage, which is on a remote control, it opens, we pull in, it closes, we go into our home, and we never have engagement with neighbors. We don't depend on neighbors for us to survive anymore. Whereas, for millennia, and even in some places today, communities depend on one another. They're forced to be communal.
Speaker 2:It literally provides survival tools for us to be able to help one another, but we don't need that anymore. You can go to the grocery store. We are building our society more and more to cater to the individual. What do we do when we eat? We go through the drive through, and we just pick it up and go.
Speaker 2:You have limited interactions with others, and you'll wonder why it's like this inflamed virus of loneliness that's just raging.
Speaker 1:Well, and you're right. That individualistic attitude, if it's not in in the context of God and the holy spirit just driven, It's all about me. It's me building a a world of me, and me can become very, very, very lonely. And so just shining the light on this reality in our souls that this was something not good before sin even entered into the world. How much worse is it now that sin is at play and that an enemy is having just free, you know, free fire at those of us who aren't protected in this area.
Speaker 1:And so we have to be on guard about it. And how can we be people who take our loneliness to God and allow him to heal it, allow him to fill it and help it? But then also out of that that healing in our lives where we can be people full, relationally full, that we also ease the loneliness of other people. What could that look like?
Speaker 2:It starts with the I wanna be very clear on this, that the first step toward curing your aloneness or others, it begins with the Lord. And we said this, but I wanna make it very clear, that you do not try to solve your own aloneness. It begins by going to the one who created us to be communal, who created us for others in relationship with others. It even says, when Jesus in, what's it, Mark chapter 12, that the greatest commandment is love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. So, it's even built into the great commandment as Jesus gave it to us, that it starts with the Lord.
Speaker 2:Helping others, loving others starts with love God first. And so, that's the beginning is where are you with the Lord? If you're turning to others to meet a God sized hole in your life, you're gonna still wrestle with aloneness. You're gonna be turning to people to meet needs that they cannot meet. And so, that can be very frustrating.
Speaker 2:If I just say, Oh, well, here's the answer. But it really does start with the Lord. There's other institutions that God gives us, once you've turned to Him, and I'd like to go step by step in the order that He gave them, if we can. The second is marriage. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Adam and Eve. Mhmm. So he gave us marriage. How does marriage remove aloneness?
Speaker 1:Well, when it's in the context of God's design, right, God said in Genesis chapter one and two, he's creating marriage and he brought them together. And he said for this reason, the two shall become one. And there's a oneness now between that husband and that wife, and it's it's a lifelong journey of serving and loving the other person. And as I as I serve you, as I love you and you love me and you serve me, what we find is a deep intimate connection that comes really because of God's creation. He's the one that came up with this whole idea of marriage When we follow the created order inside of our marriage, we experience the beauty of connection, the beauty of experiencing love.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are married, but there's still aloneness raging. Loneliness is raging. Absolutely. And yet we're in a culture that is never, it is utterly deconstructing marriage.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So are we surprised? Okay, so you just think about it. People are waiting longer to get married. People are living together, cohabitating, not getting married. What happens spiritually is not the same when you're living together as it is when you're in the covenant of marriage.
Speaker 2:We have, I mean, just talk about that for a second. You see these things, when marriage is devalued, loneliness rises.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and again, marriage is not the only way for our loneliness problem to be resolved by God. We'll talk about that. Yeah. But it's the first place in scripture that God began to formulate human relationships. I mean, out of that came every child.
Speaker 1:And out of that came friendships and colleagues and people that you go to work with and people that you work for or that you lead. I mean, that's that was the ground zero of of humanity existing was was from a marriage. And when marriage is experienced and is pursued god's way, that is a ground zero place for family, for healthy family relationships. I mean, how many people right now listening to my voice, a deep seated part of your loneliness is traced back to your family. It's traced back to the relationships that you wish you would have had, that that mother or that father that deserted you in your family.
Speaker 1:Talk about deep, deep places of loneliness, deep places of pain, or or a parent who was very detached, very distracted, very unavailable to give you love or to show you care or to enter into your world that just was not your experience or maybe a mom who was really, really cold. All of those those examples and more are very, very real, and they're very lonely places. They're very painful places. They're also very lonely places. And the ground zero of a family is a healthy marriage between a husband and a wife.
Speaker 1:And so our culture has been so hurt. I mean, one out of two marriages dissolve in divorce if that that number may be even higher. And so often people's solution because our aloneness problem doesn't go away. Apart from God, our solution is, well, forget marriage, we're gonna try it a different way. We're gonna try to go about a different way for what family and relationships.
Speaker 2:And a godless marriage will not bring you the fulfillment that you're looking for.
Speaker 1:Absolutely not.
Speaker 2:It will not remove the aloneness like a godly marriage When two people are centered on Christ, and they're filled with the Holy Spirit, and they're allowing the fruit of the spirit of God to course through them, then you begin to see beautiful oneness. You see the oneness you talked about. But you also mentioned another thing. So, marriage, God's way, does remove our loneness. But the second thing, you mentioned family.
Speaker 2:Family is another institution that God, through marriage, has given us, and I had a scripture that just jumped out at me. Psalm chapter 68 verse six, the Bible says that God places the lonely in families. Isn't that powerful?
Speaker 1:So sweet.
Speaker 2:God's design is that family also removes our loneliness.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful.
Speaker 2:And the order is healthy marriage, then healthy family. You don't turn to the kids if your marriage is messed up. It starts with healthy marriage, then healthy family, but God does give us family as a means to remove our aloneness.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. And and, you know, we're gonna talk about how how can we be people who foster deep connection and remove aloneness? How can we be people that foster that? But family is a big space where that you have the opportunity to do that.
Speaker 1:Those relationships with your children, if you're a child, those relationships with your parent. Now that can be more difficult because the parent you're the leader. Whoever the parent is is the leader of the culture of that home. And so as a child, you're under that authority. But as parents, we have an opportunity to foster, to break chains that maybe we grew up with that were really hard and to foster an environment where deep connections are actually able to happen, and it's an environment where that's safe for people to pursue.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful. And out of family, we have friends.
Speaker 3:Well, let's start. I wanna stay on family for a second because
Speaker 2:there is a true attack on the family today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is.
Speaker 2:And as this attack rages, loneliness rises. Yeah. Abortion is an attack on the family. There are children that should be being born to families that are not being born to families. That's an attack.
Speaker 2:A redefinition of the family. Go back to marriage, a redefinition of marriage, you know? Marriage is not a man and a woman in the context of a relationship with God for life. All of these are attacks. You see, there's the fatherless epidemic, where fathers are walking away from their homes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fathers are MIA, fathers are absent. All of these things are creating a greater loneness. And let's get real practical. If everybody just retreats to their rooms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Loneliness. Yeah. You can have a family and still be lonely. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You gotta fight for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had a friend that it was so sad just growing up. She would tell me that when she walked into the house every single day of every day that she lived in that house, the standard practice was everyone walked into the home, went to their own room, and shut their door.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:There was no greeting, hey. I'm home. There was no, hey. How was your day? It was everyone was living in the same house, but they might as well have been living alone.
Speaker 1:And so it's a posture. It's choices. It's it's it's so broken how we can fall into these patterns of of loneliness dictated in a home that doesn't value or pursue God's design for connection. I wanna talk for a minute, go back to God's design because the solution is found in God.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And if you go back to ground zero Genesis chapter two eighteen where God diagnosed the problem, and then he himself shared the treatment plan, and then he performed the surgery that was going to be needed. He's the one who anesthetized Adam and put Adam to sleep as he took out a rib and began to form Eve. God is the one who brought Eve to Adam, and Adam was amazed by her. There is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. This this is different than all the animals that I've been naming on Earth and working with on Earth.
Speaker 1:And it was such a beautiful moment in scripture. And then God goes on, as we said earlier, to begin to create the blueprint for what family would look like. These two people are brought together as one. And for this reason, a man leaves his mother and father and is joined together with his wife. And that leaving side note, we're in a real culture of cut off right now, and that's a whole another thing.
Speaker 1:No wonder we're all so lonely because we're carrying around a big giant bag of bitterness on our shoulders and cutting off our family members and our parents. But in that moment, it wasn't a cutting off of of Adam and Eve's parents, and they didn't have parents, but the future parents of the world. It was beautiful. It was the beginning of a brand new family unit. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But it didn't injure and hurt the surrounding family. It only built it more beautifully.
Speaker 2:As we've said before, you in order to create, you don't have to tear down.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You don't have to destroy in order to create.
Speaker 1:That's right. In in a in a world that was perfect and there was no sin, God's design was not to bring pain. God's design was to bring beauty and to bring even more fruitful connection. And so just like Adam and Eve were utterly dependent on God to address the alone problem that God identified, today, we are utterly dependent on God to address our alone problem. And yet we grab and we try to fix it ourselves for all the reasons we've talked about.
Speaker 1:I will say, and I often share bits and pieces of my own story, but I did that. I mean, as a high school student, I found my worth. I found my desire for companionship in the wrong relationships. I was in a in a dating relationship that was not God's designed for my life, and I was trying to grab that fulfillment, that connection, the feeling of companionship in in a relationship that God it was not for me. And I remember coming out of that relationship and really a season early in college where I was beginning to turn back to the Lord, but I was injured by the decisions that I'd made trying to to address my own aloneness problem and force relationships that God had not given to me.
Speaker 1:And as I was coming out of that, I remember a book called Addicted to Love. And it was one of the books that God used in my life that was such a eye opening, powerful journey for me because even the title addicted to love, like we think addicted to porn, addicted to drugs, addicted to smoking, I mean, even addicted to sugar, but addicted to love. Love is a good thing. Love is something that we're all called to do. But what the point the author was trying to make is that when love is this thing that we're chasing, this thing that we're doing everything in our power to grab and to hold and to fulfill our lives with.
Speaker 1:No longer is it god's design of love. It's now something that I have tried to grip and and morph and twist and change to try to meet my own aloneness issues. And and there's so many broken expressions how people will do that. People will grab sex, trying to grab sex to try to connect that aloneness inside their hearts. People will be in an abusive relationship because there might be a shred of someone that would love me.
Speaker 1:We we seek love through our kids, and we idolize and lift our kids to a place of trying to be my friend because I need my child to be my friend. And we do not become their parent when they need us to parent them. We want that relationship so bad, and we try to grab it on our own, and it breaks things, and we find ourselves far more lonely.
Speaker 2:I love that. Malachi, I think I I wrote this down. Malachi chapter four verse six, the bible says that God will turn the, God will turn the hearts of fathers toward their children. And I think it's such a great scripture that shows us what it looks like when you bring the Lord who can heal the aloneness into your family, right, what happens? He turns the hearts of fathers toward their children.
Speaker 2:Now, the angle on that is what's the direction? When you get God involved, all of a sudden, you're a servant to, you serve your kids. You're looking at them, as opposed to, you're looking at you. You know, you're not, God's not saying, like, your posture's not, how are they serving me? The posture is, my my face is turned toward them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My face is turned toward my wife, and your your face will be turned toward me, and your face will be turned to the kids, and that the kids are following the Lord. Their face is turned to their mother, and their faces and see, we're all helping each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's only possible. And here's the real crux of the issue. That's only possible if my loneliness has already been addressed by Christ.
Speaker 2:Bingo.
Speaker 1:Because whether you are dating today, whether you are single today, whether you are married today, whether you're a child today, whether you're a student, an empty nester, whatever phase of life that you or I might find ourselves in, we cannot love others until we have been loved by Christ. For me, when I was married later, you and I got married, I think I was 20 how old was I? Six?
Speaker 2:Six. 26.
Speaker 1:26 years old. And a lot of my friends I was in a whole lot of weddings as a bridesmaid. A lot of my friends had been married before me. Before you and I met, God had to do a major work in my heart that it wasn't going to be marriage that suddenly solved all my aloneness problems. It's not a marital status that that cures the lonely epidemic in my heart.
Speaker 1:It is the love of Christ, and my relationship status is not dependent on the love of Christ. And what happens is when I encountered the love of Christ in the deepest places as I surrendered my life to him, as I let go of things that were distracting me from him, as I got out of relationships that I knew were not of him, I began to be available to encounter God's love as I sought him. And as I began to to pursue Jesus, he was pursuing me the whole time. That love set the ground zero for me to be able to meet someone like you and be able to have a loving marriage. And that's just true in the scripture.
Speaker 1:You already quoted love the Lord your God. What's the first commandment? With all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. And second commandment, but equally important, love your neighbor as yourself. That order is so critical.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The order is critical.
Speaker 1:It's everything. Because if I don't first love the Lord my God, I cannot love you. And if I cannot love you, we're gonna be in a cycle of loneliness. And so that's whoever you know, just, again, as you're listening to this conversation, it's a lifelong journey of loving God. It's an everyday recommitment.
Speaker 1:Oh, God, I wanna give you my first love. I wanna give you my all. I wanna I wanna show you my love with my devotion and my obedience because obedience is the fruit of love when it comes to God. And out of that, I'm gonna be able to love my neighbor, which starts with my husband in this case, my children, my family, my friends, the church that we're in, the people in our lives, the I mean, it's it just continues.
Speaker 2:Well, that takes us to another thing God has given us if we really wanna deal with our aloneness. Marriage, family, but it doesn't stop there. Some people stop there. Yeah. It's also the church.
Speaker 2:God has given us the church.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's community.
Speaker 2:It is called the bride of Christ.
Speaker 1:Spiritual family.
Speaker 2:Is spiritual family. There's a metaphor, the house. The church is like a house. It's such a dominant theme in the New Testament, and the Bible says that Christ died for the church, that he's building the church, and it is there, one of the roles of the church is it helps remove aloneness. What if you're not married?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What if you don't have children?
Speaker 1:What if you lost your spouse?
Speaker 2:What if you lost your spouse? You have the church.
Speaker 1:Yes. And those connections are so beautiful. I've found some people with really tragic family of origin stories find the most incredible spiritual family that is I mean, that is so thick and so rich and so beautiful. That's the power of God's design for relationships and God's design for even spiritual family within the church. I wanna talk for a second real practically of some ways that we can take away one another's aloneness.
Speaker 3:Well, can
Speaker 2:I do this first?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, please.
Speaker 2:I wanted to really talk about the church for a second, and when we talk about the church, the reason, even in church, there's some things that the church is doing that's inherent in our culture that's making us lonely? For example, people are saying, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. Right? Yeah. What is that?
Speaker 2:That's gonna cause you to be more alone, because what you're saying is, I have a personal relationship with God by my own terms, by my own definition, and I don't really need a church. We were even with someone recently, and they said, well, and you were asking them, you were getting into it, you said, hey. Do you have a church that you love?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. She was not happy with that question.
Speaker 2:She was not happy with that question. What'd she say?
Speaker 1:She said, oh, no. We don't go to church. But we we have we're believers, but we don't go to church.
Speaker 2:She said, my husband grew up Catholic, and he's had enough church.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's had enough church. We don't go to church, but we're believers.
Speaker 2:And I'm sitting there going, yeah. What
Speaker 1:do you believe in?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you believe in? And what I was shocked, because what they've done, they've filled up their life with, this is a grandmother and grandpa, they're grandparents, and they're turning to all kinds of things to try to create
Speaker 1:Yes, room and that entities.
Speaker 2:Social entities, They clubs, different run into this room and that, have a ton of money, and and it's not working.
Speaker 1:No. And
Speaker 2:and it it won't work because you're made for the church.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're made for the church, and and you're made for depth depth in relationships. And that's where I wanna talk about taking away from alone. How do we take one another's aloneness away? I think one of the ways we feel lonely, and I think this is way over one out of three, that statistic I said earlier.
Speaker 1:But I think one way we feel lonely is not feeling known. There is something inside of us that desires to feel and to be seen and to be known. And when someone knows us, when someone cares enough to ask the question, to give us the eye contact, to to connect with us in a moment and to and to want to know more. That is a moment where you feel don't feel alone. You feel someone actively engaging with you, and it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:And so there's ways that we as people can behave and can interact with one another where we're taking away aloneness. I mean, let's just talk about marriage for a moment or or just relationships. When you engage with one another and you set aside time something we've been doing recently is we try to set aside time for us to talk. You've been doing it lately even more than normal. You've been like, hey.
Speaker 1:Let's talk for a second. Is there anything we wanna talk about? You know? You've been you've been asking me that. And that that's been intentional, I would assume.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's a moment where we can just be in our normal daily or nightly grind, you know, winding down the day. And you're being a leader in our in our relationship saying, hey. Let's take a second.
Speaker 1:Let's connect. Let's talk what's going on. And that's an example of efforting to know one another and to take away the aloneness of the other person. We do this when we go out to eat sometimes with people. What do we do?
Speaker 1:When we're on our way to go eat with a couple.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll say, okay, what do we wanna talk about? And we're just being intentional because we know we may be tired, we may have had a very stressful day, we may have been coming hot out of some meetings, you know, that were big burden meetings, and so we need to reboot, and we wanna be our best. And so we'll say, hey, let's talk about what we're gonna talk about, and
Speaker 1:Help each other.
Speaker 2:Help each other, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's a way to love our neighbor better. Yeah. That's what we're really saying. It's about how can I love the person that I'm with well?
Speaker 2:And a way that you help remove others' aloneness is listen.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Like, are you doing all the talking? Yes. We've all been to those lunches or dinners where you're just sitting there and like, I didn't get a word in. They didn't ask me one question. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's not fun. No. That makes you actually feel pretty alone.
Speaker 1:It makes you feel very alone. And so being people who grow in our skills of of just relational skills, but really grow in loving people well and and carrying out the second commandment really well. And that also means just having awareness, little things. I teach about this all the time with just relationships among women and friendship, but it's true for guys, girls, everybody. But if you're with a group of people, be aware of who is around you.
Speaker 1:If you're talking to someone about all your fun plans and there's another person standing right there thinking, hey. I'm standing right here and you're talking about all your plans that have nothing to do with me. I'm clearly not invited. That's an example where we are blinded to someone else's aloneness, and we're actually adding on Mhmm. To their aloneness rather than being people who take it away.
Speaker 2:We're big fans of careful what you post, don't make everybody else feel like they're missing out Yes. On on on our social things.
Speaker 1:It's being thoughtful.
Speaker 2:Being thoughtful. I mean, people are, you're not gonna be able to do that completely, but just have the filter of loving your neighbor and trying not to breed that. Also, and we hit on this a little bit with our family, with our kids, I love the thought of don't let everybody just retreat to their bedrooms. Yeah. You know, hey, let's have some us time.
Speaker 2:Let's get down here. We've done that where we've said, hey, come downstairs. We wanna spend time with you.
Speaker 1:Yes. When they were little, and even now, it's more natural. Now. Yeah. It's more natural even now when we have a family gathering.
Speaker 1:But when they were little, we would you know, all phones up. We're not talking family business. Inevitably, someone wants to talk about talk shop or maybe a kid is in trouble. And you and I were very careful that we're not gonna talk about discipline. We're not gonna talk about reprimanding at the table.
Speaker 1:We're going to have family connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we would redirect that regularly. And then we would have questions. Okay. Tell one good thing that happened today. What was your hardest thing that happened today?
Speaker 1:Something so very basic.
Speaker 2:To be intentional.
Speaker 1:And you and we would not allow and this was this was not preference for our kids. This was obedience for our kids. We would not allow one word answers. Oh, I I'm fine.
Speaker 2:Try again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's exactly what you would say.
Speaker 2:I'd say try again.
Speaker 1:Try again. And our kids knew this is an obedience opportunity. It's not just a if I feel like it opportunity.
Speaker 2:And then in church, you know, some ways you can feel very lonely in church, again, surrounded by others, I'd ask you some questions. Do you show up, go sit at your seat, turn around, and leave?
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:maybe even you show up a little late, and you get out of there as fast as you can. Or are you plugging in? Are you efforting? Are you going to a group? Have you found a group?
Speaker 2:Are you getting into that group? You say, Well, that group was clicky. Find a different group. Try a different group. You've got to pound in there.
Speaker 2:Are you serving? Where are you serving? Well, where I serve, I'm just doing this one. Find another way to serve. Find a way to serve that puts you around a lot of people.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 2:can't just be up to the pastors to see you, though we try. It's kind of like a let's both work together for community and connectedness.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, if you go back to Genesis three after sin happened, sin happened and there was a curse that slammed into humanity. Sin just crashed into us all. But if you go back and look at some of the fallout of sin, I mean, one of them, it was like, okay. Where you used to be able to have good food grow out of the ground for you, well, now there's gonna be thorns.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's gonna be thistles. And you're it's gonna be by the your sweat, Adam, that you're able to do this work. Well, that's true for farming. I would say it's also true for relationships. God's the one who gives good gifts.
Speaker 1:He's the one who gives us the gift of relationships, but he also tells us to partner with him and how are we gonna till the soil. How are we gonna farm the land? How are we gonna make sure we're planting good seeds? And we trust God. He's the one that's gonna help it grow.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But we've gotta be people intentional to love God first and then to love the people around us as we love ourselves, to love people well. Because if it's all about me, I'm going to be one very lonely person. But if God is filling me with his love and I'm seeking him and that's pouring out into others' relationships, I'm gonna find deep connection with people.
Speaker 2:What an important conversation. This needs to happen. Embrace community. Embrace connection. It all starts with Jesus.
Speaker 2:And, hey, let's conquer the loneliness epidemic, and we'll see you next time on The Overflow.