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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1233 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Loneliness Is No One's Friend - Ask Gramps


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1233 of our Trek and time for our Philosophy Friday series.  Each Friday, we will ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life, and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy.  As we continue on this trek called life, sometimes we have questions about life, so our Friday trek is a time where we can ‘Ask Gramps.’   Gramps will answer questions that you would like to ask your dad or granddad, but for whatever reason, this is not possible.  No matter how old we are, I know that all of us would like the opportunity to ask dad or gramps questions about life in many areas.

We may mix it up a bit on our Friday episodes, but will strive to keep them down to earth and enjoyable.   If you have any questions that you would like to ask Gramps, please email them to guthrie@wisdom-trek.com

So the question for this week is:

“Hey Gramps,  I have several friends at work, and hundreds of online friends on the various social media sites, but many days I still feel lonely.  It seems to plague me more the older I get.  Do you have any wise tips to help me overcome this loneliness and have peace and joy in my heart?
 Loneliness Is No One’s Friend
There was a song during my teen years by Simon and Garfunkel called ‘The Sounds of Silence,’ where the first line was, ‘hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.’  Do you sometimes, or quite often, feel this way?  It seems like many people do.  The busier we become, the more lonely many people seem to be.  Activity is not a replacement for genuine relationships.

Loneliness is no one’s friend, but it is everyone’s acquaintance.  While I have not experienced periods of extreme loneliness in my life, which many people do, we can all relate to that feeling.  Loneliness eats at your insides and brings a vacuum of emptiness.  It creates a gnawing hunger of wanting to belong, to be understood, and to be loved.  You can have thousands of online friends and dozens of friends in real life and still be lonely. Loneliness doesn’t come from being alone; it comes from feeling alone.

This reminds how the Old Testament character Jacob, whose name was later changed to Isreal, may have felt.  Earlier in his life, he was a man on the run.  He cheated his older brother, Esau, out of his birthright, and Esau threatened to kill him.  Jacob left Beersheba with his birthright and the blessing, both stolen, but he had little else.  He was a fugitive, he was alone, he was heading to a land, not his own, and he was depressed.  The place where Jacob found himself, a desolate, lonely place, was a picture of his barren heart.  It was a place of dashed hopes and dreams.  We read later, that just as he deceived his brother Esau, Jacob was deceived by his Uncle Laban on many occasions.   Even with these periods of loneliness, we know his experiences did create a positive desired outcome in his life, as God changed his name to Israel, God’s chosen people.
So what is the solution for your loneliness? There are some things that can help.  You must make it a priority to follow the greatest two commandments found in God’s Word. If fact, if we grasp and put into practice these two commands, everything else in our lives will fall into place.