I was listening to a song by Green Day called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and these lyrics have resonated more to me than ever throughout the years.
I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s only me, and I walk alone
I walk this empty street
On the boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one, and I walk alone
I walk alone, I walk alone
I walk alone and I walk a…
My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
Till then I walk alone
I’ve walked a lonely road for a long time and still do at times. Feel like God ordained my path a certain way just from with struggles that set me apart from the rest. I’ve always felt that I wasn’t meant to belong anywhere even when I’m surrounded by people. Every time I desperately wanted to fit in and belong to a community of people who would accept me and love me, it resulted in more loneliness and sadness.
I used to believe that God was a cold-hearted Creator who was distant and couldn’t care less about my desperation to belong, feel loved, and be known. To not have the opportunity to experience the gift of a friend. But some of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that we cannot find those in people because they will let us down. Human beings are naturally selfish, cruel, contradictory, tainted in sin, broken, and finite. It’s a byproduct of this fallen world we live in. We sin against and hurt people because nobody’s perfect. There are plenty of passages in the Bible that address how wicked and deceitful the human heart is. All the way from beginning to end.
Each and every time, God who was there all along and cared more and could relate more than I ever realized or imagined, kept bringing me back to Him even after much resistance and backsliding. But I thank Him for never giving up on me even when people fail me and can’t understand.
I have been learning and I’m still learning that God has indeed set me apart from everyone else even when the journey is lonely, painful, and hard to swallow and fathom. My road to sanctification is uniquely tailored and crafted, paved in such a way nobody can relate to no matter who I’m with or how many people I’m surrounded by. And I feel it will only deepen the more I journey towards that road. Though I feel lonely, I’m never truly alone.
I love what my friend Becka shared on loneliness and sanctification which hit home for me.
Written by Becka
But when you meet or know someone on a similar path, it’s like coming face-to-face with a kindred spirit. Finally, someone who gets it, who understands these deep longings for God! They’re like a breath of fresh air from Glory. Now there goes a solid saint!
Ever felt that in another? I have. But O, how rare they are! It is true the deeper you get in sanctification, the lonelier you become. The only One who can relate is the Lord Jesus Himself. And as Tozer rightly assessed, it is exactly this loneliness that throws this Christian back upon God, seeking the deep fellowship that often only He can provide.
THE LONELINESS OF THE CHRISTIAN
By A.W. Tozer
The loneliness of the Christian results from His walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well from that of the unregenerate world.
His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorptions in the love of Christ; and because with his circle of friends there are few who share his inner experiences, he’s forced to walk alone.
The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord himself suffered in the same way.
The man (or woman) who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the surpreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious so he is avoided, and the gulf between him and society widens.
He searches for the friends upon those garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none, he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.
It is the very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God, which he can find nowhere else.
“The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.”-G.K. Chesterton
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in the world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”-C.S. Lewis
