My life is strange. According to the Myers-Briggs test (and anyone who has met me), I am a raging extrovert. Yet I work from home and am a single parent. For someone whose natural high comes from being around people, I interact with very few during the week. In years past, especially when my children were very small, the loneliness sometimes felt overwhelming. The end of a very long day would come and I’d feel disconnected from everything and everyone.

That feeling of loneliness is one almost everyone can relate to at one point or another. It’s this knot in the pit of your stomach, a cloud that seems to settle over everything you do. During prolonged feelings of loneliness, hopelessness also sets in and you find yourself wondering if and when the feeling will ever go away.

It’s during times like these when God feels so far away. But if we know God promises to be near to us, is it wrong to feel lonely?

Not at all.

See, God knew we would feel the ache of loneliness. He knew we would sit in a dark room, wondering when that feeling would ever pass. For these times, he spoke words of comfort in the Bible. He promises to be with us, every day and in every season. Whoever you are, whatever you face, he promises to be with you. You may be walking through a very dark place in your marriage; he is with you.  You may be walking through the grief of infidelity or the difficulties of a life-threatening illness; he is with you. You may be at the end of the rope with your children, overwhelmed and feeling like a failure.  Yet still, he is with you.

When you go through times of loneliness, find comfort in the promises God gives in his Word:

1. When you pass through deep waters, I will be with you;
       your troubles will not overwhelm you.
   When you pass through fire, you will not be burned;
       the hard trials that come will not hurt you. – Isaiah 43:2 (GNTD)
2. … And I will be with you always, to the end of the age. – Matthew 28:20 (GNTD)
3. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. – Joshua 1:5 (GNTD)
4. My father and mother may abandon me,
       but the LORD will take care of me. – Psalm 27:10 (GNTD)
5. Turn to me, LORD, and be merciful to me,
       because I am lonely and weak. – Psalm 25:16 (GNTD)
6. So the LORD answers,
   “Can a woman forget her own baby
       and not love the child she bore?
   Even if a mother should forget her child,
       I will never forget you. – Isaiah 49:15 (GNTD)